Quote:
Originally Posted by MetroMPG
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.
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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.