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Old 12-20-2012, 08:58 PM   #837 (permalink)
Sven7
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Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Warren, MI
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Boo Radley - '65 Ford F100
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I am in no way an expert but would like to try to decipher this stuff. Here's what I posit. It's not fact; it's hypothesis.

There are four longitudinal vortexes forming on the car that we can see now. The major ones are coming off the side windows and rotating up and in. As they turn, they sweep outward on the rear window, clearing the snow off. The lines of snow at the edge of the rear window show us the point at which the vortexes contact the air coming off the side window.

The smaller vortexes, which I'm not so sure about, are coming off the small belt line/shoulder of the car. You can see thin streaks of snow above the serial numbers on the rear quarter panels. I believe a similar thing is happening compared to the rear window, but the air is moving from the high pressure side of the car to the lower pressure top, creating a small vortex between those snow streaks and the side windows.

The triangles at the beginning of the boat tail display the turbulence aft of my "stealth" gap filler. There is an especially large turbulent area behind the hand hole on the drivers side that I use to pull the lift gate up.

There seem to be transverse vortexes rotating behind the pop-up headlights and you can see a high pressure zone at the base of the windshield (bottom right image).

The thing I'm confused about is the diagonal snow streak between the edge of the rear window and the middle snow pile. This seems to be in the middle of that major vortex. Strange.

Hopefully those conclusions are close to reality. I've messaged our resident expert aerohead to see if he'll have anything to say... what do you all think?
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Last edited by Sven7; 12-20-2012 at 09:08 PM..
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