Quote:
Originally Posted by Concrete
Darin,
do you have any seed material / pictures for the combo taper concept
like Ben I am trying to keep my truck bed useful and am interested in this concept
but all I have found is this:
|
Hey, that is a graph that includes some of my handywork. I was a member of the TTU undergrad team that did the wind tunnel test on the cab extension - partial bed cover combination. Tim Maxwell and Walt Oler are still at Tech and probably have photos of prototype devices installed on pickups.
I have a story about that particular wind tunnel test: I was against trying that combination because I did not think it looked advantageous on CFD simulations. This was an early version of FLUENT - the pickup contour basically looked like lego blocks. I thought I could read the tea leaves just by looking at the plots of the velocity vectors to see how big the eddy was that filled the bed region. I was very naive about the limitations of CFD in regards to getting accurate results for separated flows (at least in those days). Fortunately, one of the other guys on the team found an 1/8" thick piece of wood, and quickly cut it into the right shape to go over the last third or fourth of the bed of the 1/5 scale model. My reaction was 'oh what the hell, go ahead and tape it on, it will only take about five minutes'.