Thread: Morelli Shape
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Old 09-12-2010, 01:56 PM   #85 (permalink)
Jim Bullis
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3-wheeler, (and aerohead is mentioned here)

The effect does not have to go away altogether, but just be substantially reduced. So your observation is not exact, though relevant. The bigger consideration is the volume of the passing car, and really, the cross sectional area for the most part.

Compare the blast from an 18-wheeler compared to that from a motorcycle to get a rough sense of this relationship. It also has something to do with shape, and I maintain that a flat sided box will create more of a blast than a rounded cylinder. This gets a little more complicated, but think about the way air gets entrapped under a large flat surface compared to the way it only partly is entrapped under a rounded body. This is a particularly damaging effect of double wide seating, since it really forces car underbodies to be mostly flat.

Again the rounded underbody of the Aptera seems representative of this principle, though they still manage to cram in two people. I could do that also, but partly bearing in mind the kind of thinking from aerohead about safety, I would rather reserve side space for side impact defense. Aptera talks a lot about this but I tend to think their design is oriented to the NHTSB simple test of a flat ram hitting the car flat on the side rather than to generalized random chaos when one really gets clobbered from the side.
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