As a mechanical engineer who was involved in hybrid vehicle competitions in college, I have considered designing my own vehicle. Did you use the flow simulation add-on for Solidworks? Do you perform these calculations given a travel speed (or specific flow speed) or generally?
Did you consider a CFD analysis varying the length of the fuselage canopy?
On another subject, what kind of simulation or calculations did you have to perform to construct the 3-wheeled vehicle and ensure that proper cornering/handling was maintained.
We did use the flow-simulation add-on for SolidWorks and we performed all of the simulations at 25 m/s (the flow trajectories pictures were from a CFD run at that speed), but we also performed simulations at 25 m/s with a 10 m/s crosswind.
While lengthening the canopy would result in some drag savings from the elimination of flow separation, we determined that the removal of solar cells to accomodate the larger canopy would result in a greater loss and thus decided to take the hit with the flow separation off of the canopy.
Our goal was to keep the car as low as possible (the CG as low as possible) to prevent any flipping when turning/cornerning.
As a mechanical engineer who was involved in hybrid vehicle competitions in college, I have considered designing my own vehicle. Did you use the flow simulation add-on for Solidworks? Do you perform these calculations given a travel speed (or specific flow speed) or generally?
Did you consider a CFD analysis varying the length of the fuselage canopy?
On another subject, what kind of simulation or calculations did you have to perform to construct the 3-wheeled vehicle and ensure that proper cornering/handling was maintained.
Hi Adam,
We did use the flow-simulation add-on for SolidWorks and we performed all of the simulations at 25 m/s (the flow trajectories pictures were from a CFD run at that speed), but we also performed simulations at 25 m/s with a 10 m/s crosswind.
While lengthening the canopy would result in some drag savings from the elimination of flow separation, we determined that the removal of solar cells to accomodate the larger canopy would result in a greater loss and thus decided to take the hit with the flow separation off of the canopy.
Our goal was to keep the car as low as possible (the CG as low as possible) to prevent any flipping when turning/cornerning.