November 10: Electric Car Workshop
High School clubs, Tech Center clubs, and any interested party can attend the workshop. This year’s topic is Aerodynamic Drag. The race car aerodynamicist is confronted with the problem of reducing aerodynamic drag by external shaping and flow control. Design calculations begin with Bernoulli’s equations, which assume free stream conditions of ideal air, however air does not always act like a perfect fluid on race day, and few race cars are perfectly streamlined shapes. To achieve accurate design characteristic data, wind tunnel testing is often performed on reduced-scale and full-scale models. Collected data is then interpreted and related via similitude and dimensional analysis. This workshop will present students with preliminary (ideal) design techniques, and then show how similitude, modeling, and dimensional analysis can be used to extrapolate test data of reduced-scale models to full-scale bodies.
This workshop is in support of the National Electric Cart Association. For more information, visit http://www.neca-racing.com/.
