2022 Aerodynamic Regulations Thread

[godlameroso]

I still find the floor the most fascinating piece of the puzzle, everything else is very prescribed. The floor is the area with the most freedom for creative interpretation, and there's a lot going on in order to make it work right. Those floor fences are critical both for altering the air pressure prior to the throat of the diffuser, and for managing the airflow that's trying to spill in laterally. The strakes and edge wing will have to work together for maximum effect. The wheels too act more like turbulent rudders with the wheel covers, and getting that to work with the floor will be a long iterative process.

There's a lot of furniture to manage the inboard wake of the tires, but those are hugely dependent on suspension geometry. For instance, toe out of the wheels affects the aero efficiency of the axle in question. Suspension travel, camber gain, and toe curves will have a bigger aero influence while the car is pitching, warping, yawing, rolling and so forth.

The floor will be so powerful that teams will use the rear wing mainly to tune the balance of the car, and this is a double edged sword, because if the floor loses downforce, through stalling or some other reason, you'll have a huge oversteery mess.

[Juzh]

More or less drag vs previous gen cars? Anyone care to speculate? With E10 fuel power will at best be equal if not less than in 2021, so if drag has gone up as well then we can expect very low top speeds in race trim. Then again people are saying slipstream effect will be reduced so drag must come down? If so I expect things to stay similar in terms speed traps.

[godlameroso]

Depends. If you get it wrong, the floor will produce ungodly amounts of drag, if you get it right, it will be a bit more efficient that season's past, but you can't have downforce without drag. If the cars are producing similar L/D to last generation then it's only logical they'll have ballpark similar drag figures.

What really irks me is the move to E10, it's a pointless spending exercise which does nothing but force OEMs to waste more money to just break even. Any gains that were made have been essentially cancelled by the E10 switch. Plus a loss of fuel economy means it's more challenging to manage the energy(fuel and electrical) over a race distance. I share Honda's sentiment, the teams that are bigging up their gains are overstating. Year on year the power unit improves by roughly .3-.5 in performance, this year with E10 a .3 gain would be the equivalent of a .6 gain in a regular season.

So if the power unit is an improvement over 2021, you won't see more than .1 or .2 gain. Ferrari might gain .2 or .1 over last season, Renault as well, but only because the steps they have to make to be competitive. Mercedes and Honda, I have no clue about Mercedes, but Honda has not made any huge strides in performance relative to last year because of E10. It is better than last year, but other than saying the improvement is modest would be giving away too much.

[godlameroso]

Funny they're basically saying something similar

[Zynerji]

On an odd side-question, jjn,

Is there any scenario where a team could use the main plane on the front wing for normal, ground effect downfrce generation, but use the full upper flaps as to create downwash onto the tunnels (like scoops instead of flaps) ? Like almost give up the front wing df production to gain a net advantage in the tunnels?

[Stu]

On an odd side-question, jjn,

Is there any scenario where a team could use the main plane on the front wing for normal, ground effect downfrce generation, but use the full upper flaps as to create downwash onto the tunnels (like scoops instead of flaps) ? Like almost give up the front wing df production to gain a net advantage in the tunnels?

Apologies for jumping in…
As I interpret it, the FOM people have thought of this.
There is a minimum and maximum slot gap for the front wing and the lower half of each element must terminate in an upward slope over the last 40mm of its depth (in effect also creating a minimum depth for each element).

I found this when looking for legality of my own ‘clever’ solution, which was to operate the first element with a very aggressive down wash to provide an amplified ground effect from the front wing with a much reduced AoA for the whole thing.

[godlameroso]

On an odd side-question, jjn,

Is there any scenario where a team could use the main plane on the front wing for normal, ground effect downfrce generation, but use the full upper flaps as to create downwash onto the tunnels (like scoops instead of flaps) ? Like almost give up the front wing df production to gain a net advantage in the tunnels?

Apologies for jumping in…
As I interpret it, the FOM people have thought of this.
There is a minimum and maximum slot gap for the front wing and the lower half of each element must terminate in an upward slope over the last 40mm of its depth (in effect also creating a minimum depth for each element).

I found this when looking for legality of my own ‘clever’ solution, which was to operate the first element with a very aggressive down wash to provide an amplified ground effect from the front wing with a much reduced AoA for the whole thing.

The wing element profiles are pretty restrictive, the general shape of the wing is baked into the regulations. You can play with the details, and the only thing I can see that can channel airflow into the tunnels is the inner wing fillet radius, nosecone, and camera housing.



Vortices have an interesting property, imagine a basketball spinning on your finger, you can tap the basketball and make it spin faster. You can do the same thing with vortices. If you have a vortex, and you aim airflow tangent to and in the direction of rotation, you will increase the strength of that vortex, like giving the basketball on your finger a boost so it spins faster.

The faster a vortex spins, the lower the pressure at the core. This is because the rotation of the vortex creates a centrifugal force that pushes air outward lowering the pressure at the core.

If you look at last year's cars, you could see that the slots on the bargeboard footplate were energizing the Y250 because the upwash created by the bargeboard footplate was adding angular momentum to the y250.

[Just_a_fan]

The faster a vortex spins, the lower the pressure at the core. This is because the rotation of the vortex creates a centrifugal force that pushes air outward lowering the pressure at the core.

Surely the reason the faster vortex has a lower pressure is because it's spinning faster. Faster air has lower pressure. C.f Bernoulli.

If you look at last year's cars, you could see that the slots on the bargeboard footplate were energizing the Y250 because the upwash created by the bargeboard footplate was adding angular momentum to the y250.

They created lots of co-rotating vortices. These are additive and thus strengthen the original vortex.

Looking from the front, the Y250 on the left of the car was rotating clockwise. Each little flick on the barge board footplate on the that side also created a clockwise rotating vortex. They merge and maintain/ add to the original.

[Zynerji]

I've been talking about this for a while, and haven't gotten much agreement over the years. I think Merc started this early (2013ish)

Here's some news on the subject.

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-01-tea ... rithm.html

[bosyber]

I've been talking about this for a while, and haven't gotten much agreement over the years. I think Merc started this early (2013ish)

Here's some news on the subject.

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-01-tea ... rithm.html

What an interesting article, brings me back to my materials science/engineering studies

[godlameroso]

The faster a vortex spins, the lower the pressure at the core. This is because the rotation of the vortex creates a centrifugal force that pushes air outward lowering the pressure at the core.

Surely the reason the faster vortex has a lower pressure is because it's spinning faster. Faster air has lower pressure. C.f Bernoulli.

If you look at last year's cars, you could see that the slots on the bargeboard footplate were energizing the Y250 because the upwash created by the bargeboard footplate was adding angular momentum to the y250.

They created lots of co-rotating vortices. These are additive and thus strengthen the original vortex.

Looking from the front, the Y250 on the left of the car was rotating clockwise. Each little flick on the barge board footplate on the that side also created a clockwise rotating vortex. They merge and maintain/ add to the original.

Partly yes, lower pressure also because there's less air mass at the core. Spinning air spins outward and butts against the higher pressure static air defining the wall of the vortex. Because the tendency of spinning air is to move outward, the core has lower air pressure by simply having a smaller proportion of air molecules than at the vortex wall.

The Tesla turbine exploits this fluid principle, in reverse.

[Just_a_fan]

Why would the air move from a region of low pressure to a region of high pressure?

[jjn9128]

On an odd side-question, jjn,

Is there any scenario where a team could use the main plane on the front wing for normal, ground effect downfrce generation, but use the full upper flaps as to create downwash onto the tunnels (like scoops instead of flaps) ? Like almost give up the front wing df production to gain a net advantage in the tunnels?

The elements of the front wing have to have camber for downforce. I.e there cannot be convex curvature on the underside

[Zynerji]

On an odd side-question, jjn,

Is there any scenario where a team could use the main plane on the front wing for normal, ground effect downfrce generation, but use the full upper flaps as to create downwash onto the tunnels (like scoops instead of flaps) ? Like almost give up the front wing df production to gain a net advantage in the tunnels?

The elements of the front wing have to have camber for downforce. I.e there cannot be convex curvature on the underside

Ty!

[godlameroso]

Why would the air move from a region of low pressure to a region of high pressure?

It doesn't, it always goes from high to low. You create higher than atmospheric pressure by moving through the air. The air fills the space you leave as you displace the air via turbulence, as that is the quickest way to return to atmospheric equilibrium.



A vortex needs energy to sustain itself, the tendency of air will be to come to rest and become "static" pressure if no energy is added to it. If you add energy to the air by displacing it, in the proper way, you get a vortex. The low and high pressure components are separated and in equilibrium because of the energy being fed into the system.