Aerodynamics

Infinium goes to the Wind Tunnel

Posted Sat, 06/13/2009 - 12:14pm by Steven Durbin

Infinium in the Wind Tunnel

Infinium in the Wind Tunnel

 

Yesterday, I went with four other team members to perform aerodynamic testing at the Jacobs Engineering wind tunnel. In preparation for testing, we taped bits of yarn to the car to help visualize the air flow over the body.  After securing the car to the platform, it was time to begin our testing. Being an Aerospace Engineering student, I was excited to be able to do some hands on testing, so I stayed in the tunnel for the first shakedown.  It was pretty cool.  The yarn we attached to the car allowed us to see how the air moved over the car, and what areas need to be improved.  After taking some notes, we moved on to using the smoke wand.  Smoke is another way to visualize flow over the car, but it allows you to analyze specific areas in more detail.  Using smoke was the most exciting part of the testing, but I can’t discuss our results because they are top secret : )

Meeting with the Center for Advanced Computing

Posted Fri, 03/13/2009 - 3:18pm by Alex Dowling

This afternoon Dylan Keefe-Reitzell (Race Crew Aerodynamicist), Santosh Kumar (Race Crew Strategist) and I met with Brock Palen from the Center for Advanced Computing in the College of Engineering. Brock showed us how we can utlitize some of the CAC's 3000+ computing cores to decrease computational time and increase complexity of our aerodynamic analysis and strategy optimizations. We were also happy to learn that Brock is a team alumni from the SpectrUM (2003) and MomentUM (2005) projects. We eagerly listened as he shared his past experiences on the team with us.

-Alex Dowling, Infinium Strategy Director and Head Strategist