Aerodynamics, a technology tool or a marketing opportunity? Part One It is hard to imagine how it was 2,000 years ago when the only things that people believed in were what they could see or touch, religions tried to fill the gap between reality and mysticism offering explanations for what we did not understand. Back then Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed a scientific explanation for why falling leaves moved, why trees fell down and probably why his hair and beard frequently looked a mess. He proposed that the air we breath has mass and substance. This seems so obvious now but at the time it must have sounded implausible, something you cannot see having a physical existence. But move your arm from side to side and you can feel the air on your hand. Your first aerodynamic experiment; putting your hand out of a car, bus or train window can be your second experiment. Hold your hand palm down, rotate it a little bit and you can feel lift. Hold your hand the other way up and you can feel down force, amazing! Leonardo da Vinci (yes, him again), in 1490, made some of the earliest experiments into the effects of moving water, which behaves just the same as air but gives a much stronger force, on an object held in it. He fixed a piece of wood to a stick and moved its face to different angles relative to a mountain stream and assessed the different pressure that he felt. An early aerodynamic drag experiment. This pace of understanding was slow, it was not until 1738 that Daniel Bernouli made a number of experiments on the relationship between velocity and pressure in flowing liquids that lead to an understanding of the possibility of human flight, something Leonardo was passionate about achieving. Fixing a sheet of paper to a board and folding back on itself and then using a hair dryer, or even just blowing across the paper, produces an easy experiment in creating lift. Airplane designers were looking first for increasing lift but by the early 1900s car designers were already looking for ways of reducing drag. This was mostly to achieve higher top speeds but a few forward thinking designers were looking to save fuel as well. Napiers chief engineer, SF Edge, built a test vehicle that explored the effect of frontal area of car bodies and the effects on speed and fuel consumption using a frame into which he put slats of wood to represent the body area. The designers of racing cars have never stopped looking for a competitive edge and the drivers will race whatever is fast regardless of how the car looks. Persuading car buyers that efficiency is more important than looks has never worked for the vast majority of customers. Serious aerodynamicists like Wunibald Kamm, Hans Ledwinka, and, Paul Jarays search for low-drag perfection produced some strange looking vehicles; potential customers found the futurist appearance of these cars aesthetically unacceptable. This attitude was not helped by the feeling that Futurism was a brutalist, ultra right wing political movement that wanted to reject the rural ,idyllic liberalism of post First World War Europe. Futurists?? Chrysler in the US introduced their Airflow model in 1934, with a streamlined look it borrowed the aesthetics of the modern railway locomotives of the time. Almost no customers bought the Airflow. The modern look apparently put them off buying so in 1937 Chrysler took a step back and introduced the much more successful Airflow ‘C’. In Italy at that time both Zagato with their special bodied Alfa Romeo 8C 2900 and, with more successful results, Pinin Farina with their Lancia Aerodynamica project combined modern aerodynamic forms with dramatic proportions and a pleasing look.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 17:30:00 +0000
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