Bodywork cooling -a patent

[shelly]

Looking for heat management and related stuff, besides graphite foam (and its disadvantages, like dust intolerance), I also found this interesting patent:


http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20110198070


about "MOTOR-VEHICLE WITH AN AUXILIARY COOLING SYSTEM INCLUDING ONE OR MORE RADIATORS CONSTITUTED BY VEHICLE BODY COMPONENTS"

it comes from FIAT. Will we maybe see soon a racing application of it?

[Richard]

That'll be interesting to the FIAT works team.

To be pragmatic, it might have some benefit in a road car with low heat loading and high surface area. Those circumstance don’t really apply to F1 with high thermal loading in a small surface area?

[Raptor22]

it would explain whyFerrari is rumoured to have two large wings aheadof the radiator intakes, covering the crash structure

[shelly]

That'll be interesting to the FIAT works team.

To be pragmatic, it might have some benefit in a road car with low heat loading and high surface area. Those circumstance don’t really apply to F1 with high thermal loading in a small surface area?

The patent is about an auxiliary system, so one could argue that every helping hand counts, even if just dissipates a fraction of the heat.

If I had to imagine a F1 application, it would be on the step plane, in conjunction with slightly smaller conventional radiators.

The step plane is flat, so it's easier to manufacture; plus you have almost 3m2 of surface, low height meaning no cg compromise, plus air flows fast under the floor, plus if you heat that air you get rayleigh effect on the flow.
Seems too good to be true (and probably is)

[aleks_ader]

That sort i just think if Ferrari Mount exhaust pipes more flaterned toward the bottom flor and disipated heat flow throw flor? Samo principe like in your hood cooling patend?

[Just_a_fan]

The patent could also be used by a race team to cool the hybrid system rather than, as currently, using a traditional cored radiator. Certainly it possibly gets around the issue of having a lump of metal and water high up on the car as in the McLaren last year...

[kilcoo316]

Supermarine tried a similar cooling system with the Type 224 - the first design in a path that eventually led to the Spitfire.

The 224 was a complete utter failure.

[Just_a_fan]

I guess the thing is not to try to use the system to cool a 600bhp V12 engine. But a smaller heat source such as the MGU in a KERS system might be more successfully cooled this way...

[shelly]

If it is auxiliary, you can cool part of the engine (105? 20%?) and gain from the consequnet reduction in radiators' size, both directly (less drag) and indirectly (better sidepod shape)

[Just_a_fan]

True.

[MIKEY_!]

Supermarine tried a similar cooling system with the Type 224 - the first design in a path that eventually led to the Spitfire.

The 224 was a complete utter failure.

Think that had more to do with it being rubbish in almost every other way.
And it used evaporative cooling.

[xpensive]

Do you really have to be an old geezer to remember the "surface cooled" Brabham BT46?

http://www.google.se/search?q=brabham+b ... 00&bih=799

It was just a clever decoy however, to hide what Murray was really working on, the fan-cooled and ground-effect BT46B.

[shelly]

I hope we will se something like that this year, but with real functionality,not just smoke and mirrors like in the 70s.