A Strategy for Optimum Surveys of Passenger-Car Flow Fields

<div class="htmlview paragraph">The paper summarizes various flow-field survey techniques which have been developed at Pininfarina in recent years to analyse the flow field around cars in the wind tunnel.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">Some of these techniques are now fully integrated into wind tunnel everyday work. Among them, the “14-hole probe” technique has been recently upgraded by the development of two new “micro-drag” and “vorticity” maps.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">The paper describes the most recent advances in these techniques and, mainly, the strategy employed in the Pininfarina wind tunnel to maximize the usefulness of the information obtained about a car flow-field with a minimum of wind tunnel run-time.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">The core of this strategy is the choice of a carefully chosen set of planar surveys carried out around the car in the most critical areas, so that a complete overview of the whole car flow-field can be achieved.</div>