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Old 04-13-2011, 07:25 PM   #116 (permalink)
aerohead
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whole thing

Quote:
Originally Posted by winkosmosis View Post
Read the whole thing. There is a whole section about nose design and separation. They're talking about the hood and windshield angles in the part I was referring to and even showed a diagram of the "bubble".

A flow image doesn't tell you what the vehicle's drag is. Look at the example of the fine looking smoke trails... looks great but doesn't tell you that the Cd of a Ford Escape is 0.4.... And how about the VW Beetle Frank posted? The lines look great, but the Beetle has a Cd of 0.49!
*I have many articles and peer-reviewed SAE papers which deal with fore-body aerodynamics.They were important in the 1970s.
If you're looking at Piachna's(sp?) work,his numbers are wrong.
*The Escape,at Cd 0.4 might be considered better than previous sport utilities of double that Cd.
*The Beetle,at Cd 0.495 suffers from its Pseudo-Jaray fast-back body.And remember,this is a 1936 design,when typical cars were Cd 0.70,so it looked pretty good back then.You can fix it by filling in the empty space over the beaver tail.On the modern New Beetle,this will improve the Cd from 0.39,to 0.34.With a 36" 'stinger' she'll drop to Cd 0.29.
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