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Old 08-08-2012, 01:50 PM   #479 (permalink)
Ragtag
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The slew behavior under side wind load

When driving any car onto a section of glare ice with a side wind load, you will always see the front end slew in the direction of the wind. The reason is that the front tires lose their hold on the road first. That makes the rear tires the fulcrum of a lever. The rear wheels have next to zero friction resistance to rotating at different speeds. You would need a very long tail indeed, or a very large fin to compensate.

In heavier cars the car won't slew as much because the wind doesn't provide enough force to accelerate the mass of the car appreciably in such a short period of time.

Not so hard to figure this out. The Insight has flat enough sides that you can treat the whole side projection as a flat plate with roughly equal force throughout. Assign it some value per square inch, say 1. With a value of 1 per square inch, the force disappears and you just use the area times the distance. No need to use calculus. Just measure the height of the side at rough 6" intervals. (Or figure it as best you can using measurement points that make sense to you.) Then, for each foot, (or inch) distance (depending on how big a spreadsheet you want to make) multiply that area times the distance of the midpoint of the section from your lever fulcrum.

Depending on the scenario, the lever fulcrum will usually be the rear wheels or the front wheels. Only if the whole car is on glare ice will the fulcrum be the center of mass of the vehicle. You could estimate that by driving the car onto a teeter board (or metal plate) and finding the approximate spot where the car balances.
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