Quote:
Originally Posted by examorph
thank you for the calculator, very helpful 
New question , I asked this before but after researching more I ask again, what shape should I make the car? I ask this again because I made a tear drop shape for a body around the car and tested it in the wind tunnel, the drag coefficient was about 0.5, I read on other websites that it is possible to achieve CD's of as low as 0.07! so I think I could probably do a little better than 0.5 if I change the shape, I saw images of some of the lowest CD vehicles, here is one that looked interesting:
http://www.actiflow.com/images/nuna5.jpg
http://www.techniche-europe.com/files/Nuna5_Car.jpg
What do you guys think of this? do you think I should spend my time modelling it and trying it in the wind tunnel or do you think there are better designs?
Also the car has to have 4 wheels which may cause problems with this design. |
I believe that the NUNA cars are at the low end of the drag spectrum.I think they are all 3-wheelers though.
In 1996,the Honda Dream-2 solar car team published a paper for the Japanese Society of Automotive Engineers about some research they did.It was all CFD as they ran out of time before they could put their 'car' in the tunnel.
Anyway,their Cd 0.10, 3-wheel Dream-2 was modified to 4-wheels and I think they were able to maintain around Cd 0.10.
You might check out this paper.Cd 0.10 is pretty good.They show front and side elevation views as well as the plan view.