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Old 09-30-2020, 01:47 PM   #22 (permalink)
aerohead
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 19bonestock88 View Post
This seems random especially since I’ve been absent a while but I’m about to shift back to commuting a long distance to work and highway fuel efficiency will be of paramount importance, and I’m planning a set of mods to my Saturn to reduce drag even further than in its current form.

My first thought was to redo my rear wheel skirts, partly because they’re getting tired and worn and partly to improve on the design. Having read about the new Mini Cooper GP and it’s fender flares being described as setting off from the body, and I had an idea. Instead of partial wheel skirts that don’t cover the entire wheel or skirts that curve sharply outward to cover the wheels at expense of having the curves to add drag, have a large flat panel set off from the body of the car by, say, an inch. Being not sealed to the body it should add little frontal area, prevent turbulence from the wheelwell, and could be extended rearward to sharpen the radius of the rear end for better separation. If I decided to implement this in the front, the panel being offset from the body by an inch, I could close off the front and top portion of the wheel well a little and probably make the front edge of the panel into an intake for a full height wheel air curtain.

... or am I totally crazy? Opinions? I mean it would prob take me at least 2 sheets of coroplast to make and whatever I use to stand the panels off from the body
I looked at some ion images online.
* Looks like GM already covered the 'burst edges at the rear.
* I think that the rear panel standing off the original contour would perturb the flow even more. It's 'ventilated', so it has no control over local pressures, velocities, comingling, interfering streams, turbulence, etc..
* And without 'clean' flow coming from the forebody there's no guarantee that there would even be laminar flow to allow 'anything' to work back there.
* The rockers panels would have a lot of influence and they're not 'flush' to begin with.
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* At the front, in order to harvest enough stagnation pressure to 'power' the air- curtains, you might have to penetrate the body's inner fender well, to get into the grille area. Air already around the nose of the car has velocity, but at the expense of pressure which I believe is a prerequisite for air curtain viability.
Perhaps Julian can weigh in on this, since he's done curtains on the 1st-gen Insight.
* 'closing' in for an inlet would aggravate frontal area.
* And you'd have no guarantee that any pressure wouldn't just blow air out the bottom, causing interference.
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