100% Electric Vanagon aerodynamic

[aerohead]

I have no idea what your aptitude for self-learning is, and you'll have to travel to a university that has a college of engineering to access this book, plus do the German translation, but you're not apt to ever find another book which packs in as much useful information as you'll find in:
AERODYNAMIK DES KRAFTFAHRZEUGS, by Feiherr Reinhard Koenig- Fachsenfeld, Verlag Der Motor- Rundschau, Umschau Verlag- Frankfurt Am Main, Germany, 1951.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by yabert

There is way to much others variables like air temperature, wind, etc, to end with interesting result doing this.
I know my power requirement in direct in my Vanabolt dash (like every Bolt).
At highway speed, on cruise control, this one can vary from 16 kW up to 50 kW for different reasons.
So I'm not interested to take huge amount of time doing foam prototype to have barely noticeable result or clearly wrong result.

My goal is simply to build (1 time) a high-top with a good shape who can potentially increase my range.
It will not be the perfect shape, but I'm trying to have as much information/knowledge as possible to not building something bad.

It seem like I will not find 3D flow simulators help here, but what can be a first ''accessible'' book to read about vehicle aerodynamic?
Accessible like I can understand at least 1/2 of what I read

AeroStealth and I conducted some regen/mpg tests on his BOLT over the Thanksgiving holiday.
It was very straightforward, and once the display settled into the 'new' driving mode, the miles/kWh displayed a constant readout until we 'changed' what we were doing. And since the data capture occurred within 'minutes' of the specific 'baseline', there was virtually no way 'environmental factors' could have jaded our results in any meaningful, quantitative way.
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If you took the 'less-than-two-hours' to mockup and install some version of one of your teardrop extensions, and road-test it, within a few minutes you could remove the entire thing, and immediately re-test for 'baseline,' before your local air density or ambient wind had any opportunity to change in any significant way.
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If you mentally rehearsed, you and a 'helper' could dissemble your mockup with a box-cutter, while it's off the van, recut the foam sides along pre-marked lines, re-tape the roof on, re-install, and re-test, before local weather conditions drifted, capturing the second roof shape.
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AirShaper will cost you $4,000 per iteration. $16,000 for the 4- designs you've depicted. If there's anything wrong with your 3-D scans, your results will be garbage.
Dassault ( Exa ) Powerflow, or SIEMENS Star CCM+ CFD sales persons won't return your calls if you contact them requesting pricing, and multi-core time-share processing time.
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Wind tunnel time will run $600-$4,000/hour, depending.
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All the aerodynamic books in the world will not 'tell you' specifically what your Cds ( CdAs ) will be, for what you're doing.

[freebeard]

I was looking for something else and ran across this:



[I like the speed holes on the rear fenderwells]

Rather than tumblehome from the rain gutter, a blister no wider than the roof hatch opening would cut the frontal area by 1/3rd to 1/2.

[aerohead]

The Buick stylist who introduced them referred to them as 'ventiports.'
Originally, they had electric lamps inside, which 'fired' in unison with the layout of engine cylinder location they represented.

[freebeard]

In Dallas, OR, (not TX) in the 1950s someone had a 1940 Buick straight eight, with the hood sides missing and purple neon bulbs on the spark plug wires.

[aerohead]

' would have liked to have seen that one.
I bought my 1958 Morris Minor 1000, for $ 80.00, from Beau Jones, a local hot-rod nutcase, who lived up Fallbrook Avenue from me.
He had a straight-eight Buick. What a 'hood-line' !
He 'let' us 'learn' pre-paint prep 'magic' working on his trophy-winning, burnt-orange, '32- T-bucket roadster. 'Sweat' tuition, that has paid dividends for decades.
Von Dutch was nearby in Calabasas, close to Miller Boats. We'd hike the wash from Burbank Boulevard, to the country store there. Eat giant $0.10 dill pickles, and chug root beer, while enveloped in the vapors of polyester resin and One-Shot enamel as they wafted over pre-pubescent nostrils.
It was cool to grow up around some of the 'Masters.'