Airflow visualizations on the new Corvette

Keith Tanner wrote: Carbon, fiberglass - whatever. It was a joke at the expense of the marketing crew

Flight Service wrote: It was interesting, I want to see the total picture. Not here it is through the nose and now over the hood. Clarkson liked the ZR-1 in the Vegas trip.

With judicious right-clicking, you can isolate both the looping movies and the fly-ins and see them in decent resolution. The fly-ins show how the bits and pieces link up. For example, you get a better idea of what's going on with the top of the rear arches on the fly-in to the rear of the car. I've got a magnehelic gauge sitting here that was going to be used to check a few things like wheel well pressures. I think it's going to get deployed all over the place. Another cheap way to play with airflow is to get an air gun with a long nozzle and tie a 2-3' string to the end. Aim that at features of the car and you can clearly see laminar flow, turbulence and even dead air. It's pretty cool.

My question comes in in the roof vent area. Notice how much verticle it does in the heat escape vid? Now look at the over the roofline vid. Notice how smooth the air flow goes over the hood? Doesn't lift from the engine vent like it would.

Tells me that is computer generated and not wind tunnel tests.

Junkyard_Dog wrote:

mazdeuce wrote: The "regular" roof is already carbon fiber and is light. The girl I know who drives one pulls it off herself and she's all of 5'3" and not a burly chick.

Pics and/or marital status please!

If you look at the latest issue of SportsCar right at the front there is a picture of three people looking at rallycross results at nationals. She's the girl in the picture. Tragically, she's engaged to one of the guys in the picture. She's a beautiful Peurto Rican who rallycrosses and daily drives a new C7. Let that sink in for a second.

All of the visualizations are computer generated, from CFD (digital wind tunnel). I would be very suspect of anything they actually put up on the website. The model does not have rotating wheels (tough to do in the real world at speed). The flow looks to be quite slow, typically smoke flow visualizations are done at around 30-40 mph, any faster and you can't really see the flow details. The wire frame views give some idea of speed by the color coding, but not what the range is. In CFD they could set up the range to be 1mph top to bottom which gives exaggerated results.
I suggest: don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see...
Edit: the color coding is pressure not speed... Also the blow gun with a string attached is OK for some things, but the flow at edges is tough to duplicate. Plan on making lots of pressure taps and moving the Magnahelic port around a lot. Let me know if you want a simple method for getting surface pressures using your gauge. Also keep in mind what your reference pressure is, that can throw off your results if the reference is in a noisy area or is moved.

stafford1500 wrote: Edit: the color coding is pressure not speed...

Would like to see the scale for that one.

Driven5 wrote: Neat animations, especially the wireframe ones. However, I can't help but notice the marketing speak that first confronts you...

Chevrolet Marketing Department said: Throwing off the constraints of tradition, our world-class engineers started over from scratch...

Which literally translates into:

Google Translate said: All of our most experienced and talented engineers got the berkeley out of Detroit, and the previous design wasn't worth a damn

That's almost as bad as marketing a "Nova" in Mexico. Any time someone is compelled to use the "world-class" cliché to describe any part of their own organization, it only frames the entire organization as that much less so. This is by no means exclusive to GM, or even the automotive industry.

on the Nova thing this will hopefully help clear it up.

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp