Aerodynamics of a FSG car

[dhavalshiyani]

Hey guys.....firstly it's great to be a part of F1technical.net....
I am designing the aerodynamics of a Formula Student Germany car for the first time in the history of our time. Ofcourse i am facing a lot of disagreement whether to employ it or not....coming to the point..
I've tried to develop a basic laptime simulator using Matlab but being a B.E.(mechanical) its not my feild of expertise...so i'm stuck with that....I wanted to ask whether there are other ways to calculate drag and downforce than? also how else can an aerodynamic system be justified on a car except for lapsim?...I guess all the FSG participant's would be able to tell me what the judges a lookin for in an aerosystem.....
Also would only internal aero, bodyworks design,flow through the sidepot,undertray with diffuser a tangible enough improvement on an FSG car?...is it worth spendin all that money on?
If i've made a mistake then please forgive me....i would have stuck to F1 here but could not find a theard dedicated to this topic elsewhere....
thanks in advance...please do reply...

[SpookTheHamster]

Have you tried the forums over at fsae.com?

You only have to look at the cars to see what most teams think about aero. Diffusers are popular, wings much less so. Only one car at FSG11 had wings. They were also the fastest, but it's debatable whether the wings had anything to do with that.

The average speed of an FSG car around the track is very low, and the weight penalty of a full aero system can be huge on a car that doesn't start out light.

[bl79]

A well sorted aero package will be effective. Period. Obviously though, a well sorted car is effective as well.

The short answer is, IMO that because FSAE, or FS as you guys call it, is a design competition you really need to consider other factors. You don't win solely because of laptime. You really need to justify the usage of your wings. Are the points that you are going to gain in skid pad, enduro and autox enough to offset the points that you will lose in accel and fuel economy? Obviously without a lapsim it is difficult to answer these questions.

How about another question then? Do you have the facilities to conduct experiments? You can't just slap a wing on and do well at comp. Even if the wing works wonderfully if you can't talk about why it works so well its going to be a bad day when you get to the design event.

You really need to consider whether a wing is beneficial, and whether you will be able to execute it properly and support it with cold hard data.

To me there is no question that wings will help laptime, the question is at what cost? My personal view is that while they can be beneficial there are larger gains to be made elsewhere that I would rather spend resources working towards. Maybe your team already has a well sorted car and everything runs tip top, in that case then maybe aero is the next logical choice.

I would advise heading over to fsae.com they are a helpful group and this has been debated at length.

[RacingManiac]

Considering the gains in other area of a FS/FSAE car that you can have, aero is the last place I'd look in terms of both practical design as well as the on-paper aspect. The tremendous emphasis on being able to validate your design decisions via either practical testing or lab tests is something judges look for in a successful team, and unless you have ready access to those tools it'll be very hard to validate your design decision to a judge. A well sorted simple car with good test data, well trained drivers(!), reliable operation can always guarantee to do well.

If you have the means and the resources, and it won't hamper other area of the car from being complete properly, then by all means do it....