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Race Car Wing in Ground Effect How to maximize downforce while keeping wing area at a
minimum?MultiElement Airfoils is an innovative software package written to run on an ordinary PC that is letting race car designers and engineers do just that. Automotive engineers use it to estimate the correct dimensions and spacing of wing elements that will provide the best performance for a given racing scenario. The software is easy-to-use and does not require in-depth knowledge of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) or mathematics. MultiElement Airfoils can solve a problem in just seconds on an ordinary Windows PC. The following example shows how the software can be used to estimate the downforce and drag acting on a wing that is only inches from the ground. The software also has the capabilities of analyzing wings with multiple elements such as a main wing and guide vane.
Problem
Solution
We start the solution by running MultiElement Airfoils and selecting the
NACA 2412 wing as the "real" airfoil. Since the spoiler is an upside down
wing, we use the handy built-in option to "flip" the airfoil as shown in
the dialog screen below.
Although MultiElement Airfoils allows us to drag the airfoil into position, the option is also available to set a precise location for the shape. Before leaving the dialog screen, we select an airfoil length of 12.0 inches, a horizontal location of 0.0 inches, a vertical location of 12.0 inches and an angle of rotation of -5.0 degrees. The "image" airfoil is identical in shape to the "real" one. Since the reflection is in the ground plane, the airfoil is not flipped. For the initial run, it is located at a horizontal location of 0.0 inches, a vertical location of -12.0 inches and an angle of rotation of +5.0 degrees. This is shown in the diagram below.
Results
The figure shows the pressure coefficient at surface of the airfoil as the height above the ground is decreased.
About MultiElementAirfoils
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About Dr. Hanley After graduating from MIT, Dr. Hanley joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty at the University of Connecticut where he formulated and taught courses in aerodynamics, compressible fluids, introductory fluid mechanics and heat transfer. As a faculty member, he won the highly competitive National Science Foundation Research Initiation Award, the NASA-ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship and three consecutive research awards from NASA Lewis Research center to study compressible viscous flows in turbomachinery using pseudospectral methods. This research led to the successful education of four (4) Ph.D students and four (4) Masters degree students. In addition Dr. Hanley can be credited with a number of publications including the pioneering work in multi-domain pseudospectral methods for compressible viscous flows entitled "A Strategy for the Efficient Simulation of Viscous Compressible Flows using a Multi-domain Pseudospectral Method" which can be found in Journal of Computational Physics, Vol 108, No. 1, pp. 153-158, September 1993. As owner and chief software author of Hanley Innovations, Dr. Hanley has written a number of software packages including AirfoilBrowser, Airfoil Organizer, Science Graphs, VisualFoil, ModelFoil, Aerodynamics in Plain English, Center of Gravity Calculator, WingAnalysis, SmockSoft, PerpeturalPaper amongst other titles.
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