Race cars suck

Really. Formula One Grand Prix cars and other racers use aerodynamic down force to suck the car down to increase tire traction and to keep the car from literally flying.

The suction created under the race cars is so strong that manhole covers have to be welded down when the cars take to street circuits such as Monaco and Long Beach.



F1 cars produce more down force than they weight at speeds over 80 mph, so the car could actually stick to an inverted road!

TH

Comments

Anonymous said…
Interesting post. In the design of race cars there is a lot of good aerodynamics that takes place. Take your typical airfoil shape, flip it upside-down and then span it over a length and you have a simple spoiler (as seen on the front and rear of the car), generating a lift vector towards the ground!! Hence the major ‘suction’ and the huge down force acting on the car. In fact, a lot of research is going on in the aerodynamics of automobiles at the moment. Starting back in the 1970’s and stemming from the concerns over oil, groups like NASA began to look into designing better aerodynamics into consumer vehicles. Better aerodynamics means less drag and therefore better gas mileage, which is something that we can never have too much of. NASA has recently done a lot of work on the aerodynamics of large tractor-trailers. With as many tractor-trailers that cruise the interstates here in the U.S., there could be huge saving in many trucking company’s pocket books with better gas mileage, and even better news for the environment, with lower consumption of gasoline. See the following:

http://ails.arc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/
cuwp_cgi/19.jpg?directArg=
VAC2827742347,19.jpg

This is a tractor-trailer that was put in NASA’s 80x120ft wind tunnel at Ames Research Center. Their goal was to reduce the drag the Semi saw and determine what those reductions might do to gas mileage. You can see the side panels that were installed on the trailer. These help to prevent the air streams from going around the cab and then coming back together before they hit the back wheels (that is what happens in that large void under the trailer). If they do come back together before hitting the back wheels, there are huge drag effects as that powerful air slams into the rear wheels and has no place to go. Also, the panels that are on the rear of the trailer act to smooth the flow as it comes off of the back of the truck to prevent a large drag bucket from forming behind the trailer, which also causes large drag contributions. From what I have heard, these simple modifications could save millions of dollars in gas mileage, and who knows what the results might be for the environment. You can probably expect to see company’s like Wal-Mart to start using such technologies on their trucks, not only to save money, but also to save the environment.

- Hoser
6:39 PM, January 03, 2007
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Your DNA would reach the moon

Image
Foolishness! Your DNA would actually stretch to the sun and back about 4 times! DNA is a fine, spirally coiled thread in the nucleus of every living cell that serves as a guidebook so the cells "know" what they're supposed to do. The strands are so fine you need a high power electron microscopes to see them. The human genome , the genetic code in each human cell, contains 23 DNA molecules each containing from 500 thousand to 2.5 million nucleotide pairs. DNA molecules of this size are 1.7 to 8.5 cm long when uncoiled, or about 5 cm on average. You have about 10 trillion cells in your body , so if you stretched the DNA in all the cells out, end to end, they'd stretch over 744 million miles. The moon is only about 250,000 miles away, so all your DNA would stretch to the moon and back alomst 1500 times. The sun is 93,000,000 miles away, so your DNA would reach there and back about 4 times! Interestingly, no more than 1.5 percent of the human genome contains DN
Read more

Earth's Core is Hotter Than the Sun

Image
Really! The Earth's core is hotter than the outer layer of the Sun. The Sun's huge boiling convection cells , in the outer visible layer, called the photosphere , have a temperature of 5,500°C. The Earth's core temperature is about 6100ºC . The inner core, under huge pressure, is solid and may be a single immense iron crystal . The outer core is liquid, and probably acts as a dynamo creating our magnetic field. But before you get the wrong impression, keep in mind that the core of the Sun is a broiling 15,000,000ºC. That's enough to vaporize rocks in a comet that gets too close, and enough to give you a nasty burn 93,000,000 million miles away after just a few minutes exposure when you're sun bathing. TH
Read more

What's Outside The Universe?

Image
Grandson Bailey, When we last saw you, you asked me what was beyond the edge of the Universe, and I didn't have a very good answer. To be honest, I felt like a baseball player that had practiced and practiced (I've read a lot of books and thought a lot about the same question myself), but suddenly I was standing in the outfield and a high fly ball was headed my way (your question)...and I dropped the ball. Your question is a really good one and a very hard one to answer because the ideas aren't simple and they aren't easy to understand--even for me. But I've been thinking about what you asked, and I'm really, really glad you did because it made me think hard about the question again too. Next time we see each other, maybe we can talk about this more, but here's my answer: think about the earth. It's a big ball, and when you look toward the horizon it looks like you can see where the earth stops. But you know from driving and flying that there's no ed
Read more