raymondu999 wrote:Yep. He believes a well calibrated CFD kit beats a windtunnel for accuracy any day.
It's an issue of money, and application.
Example, there is a reason Airbus and Boeing pay well in excess of £100,000 per day for use of some wind tunnel wind tunnel facilities. 1) their wind tunnels don't provide the desirable results for accuracy and precision, and 2) they have no choice. As an airframe manufacturer, for potential customers you need to give them values of Cd that will allow them to accurately calculate fuel costs for a given engine. I dont need to stress the consequences of getting that figure wrong, the cost of which is larger, than large. I said application, and in this case the application of CFD is to accurately give you Cd, primarily viscous drag. Surely that's an oxymoron?
To cut it short, if you had enough money you would take the wind tunnel any day. With the available instrumentation these days CFD has to go a long way to kill off the tunnel.
Wirth's solutions are cost effective, and maybe in turn performance effective but not for a race car where 1 tenth can mean Q2 or Q1