Macarena Wing simulations

[na85]

Hi all,

Been a longtime lurker here, finally got around to registering an account

I am going to attempt some openfoam simulations to investigate the different behaviour of the various Macarena Wing designs, beginning with effects of actuation direction (e.g. Ferrari forward-and-under vs McLaren/RBR out-and-back). Obviously spanwise flow and interaction with the central push rod mechanism on the McLaren and the Red Bull are going to be important, so I think the modeling will be a significant challenge.

Does anybody know:

• if reasonable-fidelity models exist online anywhere?
• what airfoils the teams are running on the rear wings? Probably not a named NACA profile, right?

[AR3-GP]

I can't help with any of wing sections, but if I can make a suggestion, it is to make sure your simulation would rotate the wings in under 400ms. The speed of the rotation affects the transient airflows.

[na85]

Thanks, that's in my roadmap for sure. First step is to run static meshes at various angles of attack, just as a sanity check, and then dynamic meshes later. I suspect the airfoil profiles are not published (no surprise there!) so I'll maybe just use a plausible NACA airfoil and see where the data goes.

[jjn9128]

I recommend reading the article C rules, they're freely available on the FIA website. Learn what shape the reg box is and what you are and are not allowed to do inside it, particularly pay attention to where the flap pivot is allowed to be and how it's regulated. Then look at pictures of all the cars paying attention to their chord distributions/element thicknesses. (I've seen a lot of these "studies" online now and they all get these basics wrong)

F1 teams draw their own profiles, and you wont find any literature about what methods they use but they parameterize a lot of variables so there is enough useful control to draw the shapes they want. This is probably the closest I've ever seen to explaining it, but onshape is severely limited for CAD surfacing. IMO you should be able to do a lot with NACA profiles though there are Benzing profiles which are some old school motorsport specific profiles if you want to be a bit fancier with camber.

Finally don't present your results as fact for how these wings work, but as a study with limitations. Your pressure distributions will be different compared to the teams so the wing stall characteristics will be different. Remember...


EDIT : https://upcommons.upc.edu/server/api/co ... a4/content p55 of this report has a good indication of one parameter based profile development system.