Reducing the drag of a two element wing through stall

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Giblet
Giblet
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Re: Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes MP4/25

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SLC wrote:The snorkel doesn't directly feed into the engine cover duct or the rear wing - it simply acts as an inlet to provide a reference pressure for the switching system (yes yes, the one operated by the driver's knee/leg/random appendage).

This does sound very implausible but it's what's on the grapevine!
I don't think it's that implausible at all. Pressure equalized, knee on hole, pressure no longer equal, air passes through a hole, exits in wing slot, increases volume of air under wing, makes wing less effective at speed. A lot of people here were talking total stall, which would be near impossible, definitely past implausible. I find it more interesting if the feed comes from the second deck of the diffuser, partially stalling that device as well. If it works, it is ingenious.

The brains at Mclaren are more than capable of coming up with something as big as the DDD, interter, jdamper, mass damper, etc. We are in a small box, and they have millions in expanding it outside of our immediate scope. Most of us anyways look at Manchild's nose hole that Ferrari stole and are going to pay him for soon,right Luca?

My biggest clue is that the drivers don't need extra cooling, and it is right where the drivers left knee is. The one not needed on straights. It makes sense that at the very end of the straight, the knee would be there until the last moment when the driver goes for the brake pedal.
Before I do anything I ask myself “Would an idiot do that?” And if the answer is yes, I do not do that thing. - Dwight Schrute

kalinka
kalinka
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Re: Reducing the drag of a two element wing through stall

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=D>
Raptor22, great explanation of the drag/stall situation. For me it's even more clearer now, that this wing(and blowing it) is not about stalling. I think everyone
should now understand the reasons. Your explanation is like summing all the things we were discussed here. I think if everyone could back to some common sense thinking, it is clear to me that it can't be THAT difficult. Blowing the wing ( if it is true at all ) is I think enough for either CFD ot aerodynamicist to handle with. Bringing in another effect, like stall,( if it's posibble at all ) it would be so complicated in terms of aerodynamics, that that wing would be super-sensitive for a smallest change, because of multiple requirements, and because of even more (unknown) parameters that they have to handle.

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ringo
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Joined: 29 Mar 2009, 10:57

Re: Reducing the drag of a two element wing through stall

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Raptor22 wrote:This whole stall thing does not make sense from a energy balance perspective either.

forces are fporces and they need to balance. With this stall theory there is no balance unless the extra energy comes from something powerful.

butmore on that later.
Explain the extra energy thing a little more.
I was thinking that blowing 2 or 3 times the free stream velocity will require power. There is no existing example of un powered blown flaps.

Stalling the wing is not necessarily unbalanced, remember we are talking about vertical wings here. Stalling the top element would not increase the size of the wake, since it is in the same flow field as the wake.
Stalling an air craft wing, where normally the wake is at the near trailing edge, will produced disrupted flow above the wing. So you would have 2 areas, behind the trailing edge and above the wing. Where as an F1 wing will only have one stalled area which is in the already existing wake.

The way how you would smooth out the form drag is with contracting the wake with the jet off shot from the wing. Smaller wake means less drag.
For Sure!!

Pup
Pup
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Re: Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes MP4/25

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Giblet wrote:What if there is a small unicorn in the airbox, who is fed beans and expels high pressure air at the blown wing.

Theres nothing in the rules about an active unicorn.
Between this thread and its sister in the Aero section, I feel a bit like Charlie the Unicorn right now.

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ringo
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Re: Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes MP4/25

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Giblet wrote:
SLC wrote:The snorkel doesn't directly feed into the engine cover duct or the rear wing - it simply acts as an inlet to provide a reference pressure for the switching system (yes yes, the one operated by the driver's knee/leg/random appendage).

This does sound very implausible but it's what's on the grapevine!
I don't think it's that implausible at all. Pressure equalized, knee on hole, pressure no longer equal, air passes through a hole, exits in wing slot, increases volume of air under wing, makes wing less effective at speed. A lot of people here were talking total stall, which would be near impossible, definitely past implausible. I find it more interesting if the feed comes from the second deck of the diffuser, partially stalling that device as well. If it works, it is ingenious.

The brains at Mclaren are more than capable of coming up with something as big as the DDD, interter, jdamper, mass damper, etc. We are in a small box, and they have millions in expanding it outside of our immediate scope. Most of us anyways look at Manchild's nose hole that Ferrari stole and are going to pay him for soon,right Luca?

My biggest clue is that the drivers don't need extra cooling, and it is right where the drivers left knee is. The one not needed on straights. It makes sense that at the very end of the straight, the knee would be there until the last moment when the driver goes for the brake pedal.
But since you mention that, there must be a physical partition associated with the the air going to the wing. No one can seem to get proper details on how this knee switch works. The regulations says there should be no degree of freedom with any construction of the sprung mass especially related to aerodynamics. The only loop hole here is that the knee is not part of the construction of the car.
Other than the knee, the snorkel theory suggests that after the knee allows the pressure signal to pass, this signal then operates some kind of barrier or valve correct?
This barrier would be considered construction that has a degree of freedom which comes in contact with the air used on the wing.
This is my only problem with the knee switch idea. The fact that it is a switch means it is opening and closing something which controls the air flow.
About the pressure equalizing thing, the snorkel air cannot be used to block the fin air, especially air of a lower mass flow and energy.
The air in the fin duct will have a higher static and velocity head than the lower air in the snorkel, which has less mass flow more friction and end losses due to the piping and knee.

another way to look at is here:

Image

See what i am getting at with the knee thing? look how contorted the driver is already, :wtf: I don't even know how much poor Button will be able to move his knees. :mrgreen:
Much less have some other pipe in the cockpit right behind the knee to duct that air to the wing after his knee is out of the way. What's more the question of how the switch is to be operated with no rigid barrier makes this theory even more difficult.
For Sure!!

Raptor22
Raptor22
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Re: Reducing the drag of a two element wing through stall

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Ringo I'm not really sure what you're suggesting.

when a body moves through a fluid, the friction that is experienced is due to molecular adhesion forces. We reduce the friction by controlling the gradient of the adhesion between layers of air and the body. Hence the boundary layer is slow moving but the layer above it moves quicker and the layer above that even quicker. The cohesive forces between air molecules is greater than the adhesive forces between air and epoxy resin. Hence the energy required to move the air molecules is at a minimum. Add turbulence and the molecules require more energy to break down that turbulence.
So when air molecules move over a wing the boundary layer as we call it is a thin layer of air that is adhesively attracted to the wing material but cohesively bonded to the air around it.
This is when we have smooth flow and most streamlined since we are not introducing molecules traveling in the opposite direction exerting an adhesive force on the wing but worse, requiring a lot of energy to return to rest. that energy is taken from the body moving through it.
Hence we have the ideal conditions for creating the lowest possible pressure (smooth non turbulent flow).
Naturally turbulence is a fact of life but we try to minimise it in the boundary layer to reduce the energy absorbed from the body.

Wake is turbulent air that's created by the difference in velocity of two air streams meeting. It consists of cohesive bonded atoms of gas rearranging themselves. This rearrangement absorbs energy hence wing designers want the wake to be as small as possible and if possible to not be in physical contact with the body/wing/fuselage since that energy will serve to retard the body, hence airbrakes are so effective.

when a wing stalls, the turbulent flow coupled the wake to the body of the object and that absorbs energy i.e. take more power to drive.

So stalling a wing in an already massive wake is not the point. where the wake interact with the body is important. if the wake is already in contact with the wing it absorbs energy and requires more power to drive.

Now as far as flap blowing is concerned, in my experience, x2 or x3 freestream velocity is not required.
On aircraft they use flap blowing for heavy lift vehicles because the trade off to be made is huge.
An aircraft is designed to be efficient at a certain altitude. Engines can produce a lot of thrust at low altitude but often they reach max performance at maybe 5000m to 10,000m

its at this operating altitude that the wings are designed to be most efficient. At low altitudes the create a lot of drag which absorbs some lift capacity.
Remember CoD is proportional to velocity, surface area and density.
Hence to improve efficiency at low altitude while maintaining high altitude performance blowing the flap to fool it into thinking the aircraft is traveling much faster is desirable.

In F1, if they could blow the flap with a compressor, i.e the engine, they would but it's not allowed so they have to make use of what they have, pressure gradients at different parts of the car.


There are instances where (forgive me) vortices are used to add energy into a freestream but in all those cases there is a powerful pump behind it. I've never seen it applied in practice either, just in experiments.

The (forgive me) vortex that comes off the F/A-18 forward chines is a side effect of the chine shaping. The chine is there to increase the effective wing area without adding wingspan. Those chine are useful for maintain angle of attack through very hard high speed turns like trying to evade a Vympel AA-11 thrust vectoring A-A missile.
The Mig -29 uses a lifting body shape to achieve the same thing only more efficiently.

back to F1 cars...

I don't believe the vertical nature of the upper element of the rear wing is a great concern. Its essentially an upside down flap that many aircraft use to improve lift at low speedswithout stall.
What is important is the AOA of each element to the stream it. The airstream approaching the upper element is nearly vertical already, but still coupled.

In a aircrafts flap, if the flap stalls the aircraft does not speed up in its glide path, it slows down and loses altitude, compounding the problem. The stall has slowed down the airflow but it also slows the aircraft down because the body s now pulling a much greater mass of air behind it (wake)

Same for an F1 wing, stall the wing, the flow decouples and the wake attaches to the car, slowing it down. You certainly don't want that wake dragging along coupled to the wing. You want that air to flow off the wing smoothly and create turbulence away from the wing and the car.

Very tough to achieve with an F1 car but hence the desire to make the rear of the car as small as possible. This way the car can allow a much larger volume of air to pass around the rear and fill in the wake after it has left the wings and diffuser.

Going faster is all about not stalling (this applies to all things in life :lol: )
Last edited by Raptor22 on 03 Mar 2010, 09:51, edited 1 time in total.

SLC
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Re: Reducing the drag of a two element wing through stall

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Raptor22 wrote: Going faster is all about not stalling (this applies to all things in life :lol: )
Not an F1 car travelling in a straight line.

Raptor22
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Re: Reducing the drag of a two element wing through stall

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well thats a blanket statement you persist in making without any explanation, diagram or anything other than I'm a Phd in Ground vehicle aerodynamics and work for an f1 team.

So until you actually explain yourself with science and not a belligerent attitude toward a counter intuitive concept I will consider you a fanboy with a fantasy.


Look forward to your side of the story.

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Shaddock
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Re: Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes MP4/25

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greenall wrote:Putting the snorkel on the nose will have little impact on overall drag or quality of air flowing to the rear wing.

But it will if it goes to the floor and feeds the diffuser?? :?
Then why not make it the full width of the car, rather than just on the left hand side. The more air the the diffuser the better it works. The air from the snorkel will be fairly high pressure but low volume due to its smallish size.

Richard
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Re: Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes MP4/25

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hmm.... snorkel on left side, duct exit on left side, KERS located on left side????

The KERS embargo is only a gentlemen's agreement by FOTA ..... 8)

I'm not convinced about the unicorn, they're too vain with all their preening, and Lewis wouldn't allow anyone/thing to out shine "The Boss".

cornermarker
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Re: Reducing the drag of a two element wing through stall

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Raptor22 wrote: There are instances where (forgive me) vortices are used to add energy into a freestream but in all those cases there is a powerful pump behind it. I've never seen it applied in practice either, just in experiments.
Raptor22, I was hoping to get your opinion over in the engine cover/fin thread on some things I found that lead me to believe they are actually vortex generating jets. Turns out the jets don't need to be very high pressure, in fact some of the papers specifically talk about "passive air jet vortex generators", that connect the jets with openings in the leading edge via a tube. All that's required is that the air from the jets "roll up" with the free stream where it would normally separate. It's nothing like a blown flap, instead like an array of vortex generators, but without the drag.

Kelpster

autogyro
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Re: Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes MP4/25

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There is of course a foot operated throttle close to the fin intake.

marcush.
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Re: Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes MP4/25

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autogyro wrote:There is of course a foot operated throttle close to the fin intake.
haha the hose is run a bit crude and less than perfect below the throttle pedal ala
Toyota prius floormat and gets squeezed close when full throttle is applied...no knee
.. =D>

Raptor22
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Re: Reducing the drag of a two element wing through stall

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Correct, high pressure is not needed. All that is need is an exit nozzle directed correctly and a higher pressure than that on the wing surface around the exit.
This is enough to maintain boundary layer attachment.

Sorry I've not hopped around responding in other threads. Not sure how many there are right now.

McLaren are certainly within their rights to use moles on forums to promote ideas that create exposure for their car and sponsors. thats what I think is going on here.

autogyro
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Re: Reducing the drag of a two element wing through stall

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SLC wrote:
Raptor22 wrote: Going faster is all about not stalling (this applies to all things in life :lol: )
Not an F1 car travelling in a straight line.
OK SLC so how about:-
Knee covers hole, no jet blowing over rear of upper wing element.
Rear of element stalls, DF from rear of element ceases.
Form drag force increase is less than DF.
Higher top speed.
Knee uncovers hole, air blown through slot onto rear of upper wing element.
Laminar flow established, DF created drag force increased.
Aero set up for cornering.