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Old 03-13-2009, 03:00 PM   #195 (permalink)
aerohead
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don't know

Quote:
Originally Posted by MetroMPG View Post
I don't know how much the state of the art for CFD has changed in the last 11 years (I imagine a lot), but Hucho was a strong proponent of hands-on wind tunnel development/testing in his 1998 book.

I wonder if it is still true that "automobile aerodynamics is still dominated by empiricism, shape optimization in particular".

Don't know enough about CFD to say.
The thought that keeps recycling through my mind is,that the stylist still has domain over the "spirit" of the vehicle form,and the aerodynamicist is allowed a very small degree of freedom to "optimize" what the stylist has created,as long as it does not "alter" the spirit of the car's shape.------------------------- As far as CFD goes,it seems to get better and better,reducing expensive wind-tunnel time,maybe culling it down to final verification.Not too long ago,one of the members posted a thread about MIT solving the spherical-coordinate Navier-Stokes equation,opening the door to really accurate 3-dimentional CFD.
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