netoperek wrote: ↑16 Apr 2019, 18:20
hollus wrote: ↑16 Apr 2019, 17:49
Cooling bodywork instead of radiators:
http://www.grandprixhistory.org/brab46.htm
I wonder if this would be doable now that there is less cooling to do. Also, considering the amount of electrical energy available in the car... could one "Peltierize" the car's skin? Or just water circulating through a double layer skin. As a plus, the cars could be covered in shiny copper
Chances are that it would, once again, make the car slower.
I guess the chances are also stratospheric that it would be outlawed immediately.
You'd need to maximise surface area of the bodywork, either with some micro fins, which would got banned in the milisecond or with some really rough finish, which could end up in destroying whole aero (or not, I've no clue
)
Maybe embedding heatpipes into construction/bodywork parts?
Surface radiators were a very viable solution for the Schneider Trophy racing seaplanes of the interwar era, and did not require a rough surface at all. They were basically a corrugated copper sheet with an upper and lower skin. The Gloster examples were made as a sleeve that literally slid onto the wings. The Supermarine S6 and S6B of 1929 and 1931 also had surface oil cooling, but this did require some external corrugation - the oil was fed back along the sides of the fuselage within small longitudinal 'ribs', into the tail fin which was itself a surface radiator, and back to the engine.
Considering we're talking about 1920s/early 30s technology with supercharged engines that produced up to 2,000hp and ran at full throttle for several hours, I don't see that they couldn't be made to work very effectively with nearly a century's advances. The obvious problems are weight, the consequences of a crash (any slight surface damage and you've got boiling coolant everywhere), difficulty in handling for mechanics and marshals, complexity (bye bye easily removeable bodywork)
It would be more practical, I would suggest, to use surface radiators in areas like the rear wing, say, as a means of allowing you to reduce the size of conventional radiators rather than replacing them altogether