To many riders, what impacts their feelings about a car is nothing more than the styling, body lines and paint color. Today we are going to talk about Automotive Aerodynamics, which is closely related to a car’s styling and body lines.
Although many cars take aerodynamics into consideration when designing the styling, there’s still a long way to reach a best performance, just with the constraint of cost saving.
Yet it’s just aerodynamics, the invisible hand, that becomes one of the keys to winning a racing game. Let’s see air-kits in the daily car modifying, and chassis planarization technology that was only used in high-end sports cars before. How could they help a car’s performance?
In order to grasp the exact effectiveness of air-kits and get the best of the air force, wind tunnel tests are the steps in necessity.
Planarization works by reducing air resistance of the chassis, speeding up the airflow below it, producing a downward negative pressure, thus resulting in a downward pressure so that the car is more stable at high speeds. This is contrary to the aerodynamics applied in aircraft wings, as the plane takes off by an upward negative pressure. Meanwhile, a flat chassis helps to reduce the wind noise when driving, making a quiet journey.
At present, the so declared “chassis planarization technology ” of many cars in the market is just a gimmick.
The front of a car is even more important in the design of aerodynamics, as it meets the wind at the earliest. So reducing the wind resistance of the front could help to better the engine performance as well as the fuel consumption. In addition to the engine’s air intake system, the surrounding cooling and braking system, special designs are applied to any remaining places that could cause a wind drag, so that the car’s front just meets the wind at a minimum proportion.
Airflow effect is also used in hood vents which are often seen on the high-powered refitted vehicles. It reduces the engine’s heat through the rapid air flow above the hood.
As for the upward shunt, the current modified parts in the market are mainly focused on modeling, but not practical in the effectiveness of air power.
Some racing cars have chassis planarization technology applied, so the chassis airflow, faster than airflow on the body, could form an upward vortex when it goes through the rear bumper, and this really has a negative impact on the racing car because the car needs a downward pressure in the rear. In order to offset this vortex, the backward extending shunt could extend and guide the chassis airflow away from the rear, thereby eliminating the impact on the rear.
