Wing designs

[kkobayash]

I was just reading about a team in Sweden who have designed a new sort of skin for aircraft wings. Bits of the article are as follows:

The performance-sapping turbulence of air passing over aircraft wings can be suppressed by carefully designed roughness in the surfaces.
Turbulence is associated with increased friction drag, the resistance of a thin body when it slides past slower moving air. Delaying turbulence is important to decrease the drag. Conventional view is that to minimise turbulence, wings need to be extremely smooth. Aerodynamic specialists have also considered actively controlling turbulence through complex and costly mechanisms such as continuously sucking the turbulent air through holes in the wing to pull smooth airflow towards the surface. A more recent suggestion is that rough surfaces could actually help control turbulent airflows.

They found that covering a smooth surface with a series of small pill-like discs, each just 1.4millimetres high and 4.2mm across, can actually delay or inhibit the onset of turbulence, reducing dragby up to a factor of 10. The discs create tiny whirlpools of airflow. These weaken and smooth out the bigger airflow disturbances around the aircraft skin, which would otherwise rapidly grow to produce turbulence. (NewScientist, March Edition)


Anyways, i was just wondering if this could applied to the front/rear wings of an F1 car?? or if not even the 'sucking holes' idea that was mentioned? (has that already been tried and banned??)

I'm sure that the turbulences that are experienced by an aircraft wing, (due to its speeds) far exceed those of F1 car, but they both use the same principle right, so could this 'design' be used??

thanx

[Sawtooth-spike]

is this similar to the Effect a golf ball has with its dimples?

[zac510]

Sort of, but the golfball dimples wouldn't be advantageous if the golf ball didn't spin backwards in the air.

I'm imaging it creates some kind of boundary layer but I better leave it to others like kilco who really know what is going on

[Monstrobolaxa]

Actually dimples im golf balls do work even if the ball isn't spinning the simply create a turbulent boundary layer earlier that prevents the airflow from separating...this reduces pressure drag, though it does increase slightly surface drag. (search on the web or in an aero book about how the Cd of a cilinder varies at diferent Reynolds numbers...you'll see there's a drop at higher values...even without it spinning).

What started this discussion was discussed in a aerodynamics class last semestre. What happens is that you can use "vortex-generatores" to attach the flow around an object or guideing the airflow in a certain way by using them.

What happens is that this works at high speeds...a F1 car is fairly slow, when compared to an aircraft. There's a big possibility of an increase of surface drag without a decrease in pressure drag...this would mean you'd overall have more drag.

Using dimples on F1 cars...wouldn't be a good idea because of this! And also because you wouldn't want to upset the airflow to the rear wing...more then it already is! It could be usefull if it would make the flow, flow in a determined way! But this can only be achieved at determined speeds....so in order to have it working efficiently at diferent speeds you'd need a "moving aero" device...that would morph.

[DaveKillens]

Here's another application for low drag surfaces, a form of ribbing.
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/spinoff1996/45.html

[miqi23]

[bhall]

Here's another application for low drag surfaces, a form of ribbing.
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/spinoff1996/45.html

I've wondered why F1 teams haven't used those. America's Cup boats have used them for years, and 3M said that if used on an aircraft, they could reduce drag by as much as 7%.

I'm not sure those riblets could be of much use just anywhere on an F1 car, but maybe on the front and rear wings. It would seem to me that if you can reduce drag by 7% on those surfaces, you could increase downforce by a proportional amount without any gain in aerodynamic resistance.