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Old 03-04-2012, 06:57 PM   #1 (permalink)
_ace_
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Default Quick and very dirty CFD run on the Z

Hey guys, I'm an aero/mech engineer by trade and am doing grad school part time. I have a CFD class and didn't feel like doing the work right now, so I threw together a quick and very dirty run of the Z in CFD.

I built the model by tracing the edges of a picture, and the car was at a slight angle. The spoiler is really just a rough guess since the angle made it hard to see. I had an input air of 100 mph (44.7 m/s) and I put the Z pretty close to true scale based on the wheelbase dimensions.

[nerd talk]On the CFD run, the back face is a pressure BC, and the top and bottom are just using symmetry. The fluid field is 1000 inches, with 300 in front of the car, and 250 tall with the car at its approximate ride height from the picture. The red dashed line is the symmetry BC. I used default options on the solver and didn't even look to see what I was assuming. [/nerd talk]

So it's probably pretty far from accurate, but I thought the pictures were still neat.

Here's what the 2D sketch came from, using a CAD program:


Here are the velocity results:



The pressure results:




I thought it was interesting to see the underbody pressure was affected so much by the presence of a spoiler. No idea if it's really accurate though!

Last edited by _ace_; 03-04-2012 at 07:59 PM.
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