I have been keeping close contact with my friend that operates the wind
tunnel in Mooresville, NC. It is a 40-50% scale rolling bed tunnel. I know
they have done a lot of different test on it since opening last year. Mostly
Nascar stuff, sports cars, top fuel dragsters, and even the U S bobsled for
the Olympics. One neat thing I haven't had a chance to see yet is the
replacement of the old smoke test. They are now using a nitrogen bubble
atmosphere to create a 3D image of the airflow. The deal is usually a
package deal with them doing a 3D laser scan of the car and making a carbon
fiber model plus furnishing you with an operator engineer. Whose only
purpose is to assist in model setup, and operations and data gathering of
the tunnel. Its up to you as to how your data is analyzed. A 5 day running
time package ain't cheap some where in the neighborhood of $100,000 about
$1100/hour. And guess what they own the model. You only rent it from them.
Last time I was there they had a computer setup that was running a program
that did show different down forces at various locations on the car. Another
neat item in the program was computed horsepower requirements derived from
the rolling bed and Cd load on the car according to speed. I am going to try
to get a copy of one of the top fuel runs as it would relate closely to a
lakester, and If I can get it posted somewhere. You should see how much data
can actually be gather in just one run in the tunnel. Might be able to
arrange a small group tour of the place if anyone is interested. For the
average racer a wind tunnel is way to much overkill and too costly. But lots
of ground can be made from the data if cost is no object.
Bill
----- Original Message -----
From: "landspeedracer" <landspeedracer@msn.com>
To: "Land Speed List" <land-speed@autox.team.net>
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 6:54 AM
Subject: Wind tunnel
> We all know that wind tunnel time for our cars/scooters is expensive.
Don't
> know that any of us has ever been in a tunnel, except Bob Summers (forty
years
> ago) and Jim Fueling (GM connection). Not much of a data base as these are
> both Streamliners and only two at that. Now you guys may know of others,
but
> do we have any data to go with that? Since we can generally only speculate
> about our vehicles it would be nice to learn something factual about
> Lakesters, Roadsters, Coupes and scooters.
>
> So I was wondering if there would are any small (scale) tunnels that might
be
> available at some Universities that we could somehow use. Not sure how to
find
> them. Just might be a student who needs a project to write a paper on.
>
> Building an accurate model is no small task, but I am sure there are some
> amongst us who could accomplish this task extremely well.
>
> Maybe I'm just dreaming.
>
> John Beckett
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