McLaren have chosen some interesting design routes on their new competitor. In addition to our own technical analysis, McLaren's Tim Goss and Paddy Lowe explain why some decisions have been made in light of the regulation changes.
I'm thinking the other way...Pup wrote:We may be on the same page already - adding a stream of air to the underside of the wing to keep the boundary layer attached (which could possibly be controlled to a degree). But I'm not sure I'd call that air 'disruptive'. Still thinking.
Your right...you do it at the same time as other things, like they did. According to the Mclaren web site Button was still using the time to familiarize himself with the car whilesegedunum wrote:You don't do that at the expense of other things you need to do in the tests.thestig84 wrote:Or your quite happy with the base line of the car and you know now is the only time to gather this data.
Good for him, but that doesn't amount to actually doing anything useful.thestig84 wrote:According to the Mclaren web site Button was still using the time to familiarize himself with the car...
They weren't getting much else done then."The dry start to the day permitted aerodynamic measurements of the car to be taken as planned. This included short runs with instrumentation on the car to gauge flow structures."
You're thinking they're purposely attempting to further disrupt airflow behind the car to impede closely-following cars..?SZ wrote:I'm thinking the other way...Pup wrote:We may be on the same page already - adding a stream of air to the underside of the wing to keep the boundary layer attached (which could possibly be controlled to a degree). But I'm not sure I'd call that air 'disruptive'. Still thinking.
my god you're sinister!You don't build a rig like this overnight. This was planned a long time ago.segedunum wrote: They weren't getting much else done then.
Yes...Fil wrote:You're thinking they're purposely attempting to further disrupt airflow behind the car...
NO. But very close. Think of what happens when you disrupt the airflow on a certain part of a wing that isn't the high pressure side... VERY NEARLY THERE PEOPLE.Fil wrote:...to further disrupt airflow behind the car to impede closely-following cars..?
YesFil wrote:
.SZ wrote:Thank God someone's thinking - it's just a bloody wake rake, used in aero testing all the time. You use these in a tunnel to interrogate flow, e.g. in F1 you'd use it to measure performance against CFD. Flow around a rotating wheel is highly unstable and very, very difficult to get right in CFD. The interactions between wheel and front wind endplate are very significant also (a few good papers on this floating out) so all in all there's a lot going on in this region and it's important to understand what's what.newbie wrote:some of the explanations here for that wake array have been simply rediculous. thanks for the laughs!!!
As some have suggested, it is a pitot array for measuring the front wheel wake...possibly THE most important characteristic of an F1 car as it's position and behavior has a knock-on effect on floor and diffuser performance.
They'll probably have chosen a few steady state positions (straight ahead, full lock turning, etc) and are simply mapping the flow behind the front wheel to see what's what. It's possible they're also very smart and are using it to look at transient behaviours e.g. as the car moves from straight ahead to yaw, as the front wheel turns, etc.
You can pick up the steady state positions in a wind tunnel no problem but there are always scaling effects.
You can't pick up the transient stuff in a wind tunnel as you can't reposition a model quickly enough (not at >=50% scale).
It's a pain in the ass having a full grid of pitot tubes as that's quite intrusive and the channel count is very high, much easier to manufacture a single row and then just traverse that. They're probably sampling very, very quickly.
Given that the rake alone takes an age to make, I don't think this is a sign of desperation from McLaren, they'd have looked at building this a long time ago as getting some decent data out of a slow day or similar.
n smikle, you do it in a wind tunnel as easily as you would on track either with a similar rake, usually with one fixed to the tunnel. The device that you traverse doesn't necessarily have to be a pitot tube, it can be any device used to interrogate flow. This is pretty standard in aero testing for anything.
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Tyre temperature is measured with infra red pyrometers generally and there's only three of them used (inner, middle, outer). How people might think these sensors - that run far wide of the width of the tyre - are measure tyre temperature is beyond me.
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Mr G, Raptor 22, that cannot be what McLaren's doing with their rear wing. The pipe losses in such a duct would be huge. That alone gives me a clue as to what they might be up to, which is potentially far more sinister than what you've presented here.
Think about it.
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Whoever pulled up that flow viz pic of last year's car, the distribution of paint looks normal. It'll blow off where the air is faster and it's fastest on the underside of a big wing in clean flow. I'd suggest they've applied it everywhere evenly.
I'd also suggest that that pic was taken when McLaren had no idea what the car was doing and were getting desperate, or you'd have no need to do the entire rear end.
It's correct in that air goes from one place to another, but what it's intended to do there is completely misunderstood.Raptor22 wrote:re Mr G.'s concept, its loosely correct.
Ciro's topic, item number 6.Mr.G wrote:Hi All,
Whad do you think about this idea, is it possible? Sorry I do not go trough all 66 pages
If you mean 'wing' not 'wind', then TEN POINTS TO THE DARK KNIGHT.Darknight wrote:Would make sense if you could stall the wind for higher top speed.
Crabbia, most wind tunnel facilities worth their salt keep pitot rakes on hand. It's as fundamental a tool in an aerodynamicists' arsenal as flow viz paint, wool tufts, force balances, a manometer, etc. There is very little outlay in manufacturing them. It's a bunch of tubes on a take, and you can mount that in turn on some sort of traverse if you like. There are more complicated variations on the theme but if someone claims to know your way around basic aerodynamics and thinks that a pitot rake is exoctic... back to school - in any aero introductory text it's the first device mentioned right after Bernoulli's law gets an introduction.Crabbia wrote:as SZ has said it is incredibly hard to model all the dynamic conditions is a wind tunnel, especially when scaling, but one thing they will never know for sure is how the new tyre characteristics affect the flow. and not just the new size, there will be a new construction of tyre due to the increased weight of the cars. this means different spring rates of the tyre, which again is impossible to model in a wind tunnel.
this is not like last year. mclaren probably poured the money they had allocated to the design and construction of wheel fairing into these pitot tube rakes as a means of continuing development in this area.
i understand wake rakes are a basic piece of kit, but the wake rake in question can hardly be considered a basic piece of kit can it?SZ wrote:There are more complicated variations on the theme but if someone claims to know your way around basic aerodynamics and thinks that a pitot rake is exoctic... back to school - in any aero introductory text it's the first device mentioned right after Bernoulli's law gets an introduction.
Yes i meant wing sorry.. was typing before running to a meeting.SZ wrote:If you mean 'wing' not 'wind', then TEN POINTS TO THE DARK KNIGHT.Darknight wrote:Would make sense if you could stall the wind for higher top speed.
Then there's working out what's sinister about it... halfway there guys!
