How F1 Wind Tunnels Work

Wind Tunnels are powerhouses of F1 research. But how do they work and how to teams extract information from them?

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Music: "Chess Moves" by Telegrams

[deeznoots]

Wind goes in, wind goes out. Nobody can explain that

[vale.antoni]

2:22 Oops. You have summoned Dustin from Smarter Everyday

[Anriandor]

Here I am, thinking they just put a fan in front of their car and look how the air moves...

[christiancandler]

Interviewer: "What makes you qualified to be an aerodynamicist for our f1 team?"
Me: "I've watched all of chainbears videos and read Adrian Newey's autobiography"
F1 team: "you're hired!"

[attilioes]

I discovered this channel like 2 days ago and since then I have literally been doing nothing but binge watching your videos, it's like sooo addicting

[bondrules]

Everyone else: wind tunnels
Me: ooh he's got a SM58

[LatiosBlade]

Ferrari: "SOMEBODY WRITE THAT DOWN, WRITE THAT DOWN!"

[allenqueen]

I find wind tunnels and cfd animations fascinating to look at. Something about seeing the air move, which is generally invisible gets me excited. It's like I'm looking at something I'm not really allowed to. Rebellious.

[Huntracony]

Knowing quite a bit about computer simulation, I highly doubt we'll get rid of wind tunnels any time soon. Fluid dynamics (air is also a fluid) are incredibly complicated to simulate, not to mention things like resonances that come along with it. Even if we have the software to accurately simulate it (which I don't think we do at the moment, though I could be wrong), it'll be quite slow and it'll have to start over for every small change you make to the setup (like changing the angle the wind comes from). So, while simulations can be quite useful, I don't think they'll be replacing wind tunnels any time soon.

[mceajc]

I find it best to think about wind tunnels in this way:

It is easiest to have your instruments and the thing you're interested in stationary. (Think how difficult it would be to have very precise instruments attached to a car as it is haring around a track in still air).

Now your problem is having the moving air mimic stationary air, while actually moving past your instruments and the test subject.

Still air doesn't move much, so you have to make sure the air interacts with itself much less than it interacts with the thing you want to measure.

Wind tunnels trick the object into behaving as though it is moving fast through still air, instead of sitting still in fast air.

So the big problem to solve is how to make the air behave as though it isn't moving, even though it's screaming around a loop very quickly.

[Enzo_RJL]

its awesome to see how far you've come since the first video on aerodynamics (slipstreaming vs dirty air)

[Bastiaan_net]

You always seem to blow me away (no pun intended) with your animations. They always make things so clear and easy to understand. Top job!

[manuelroza]

simple:

just throw some air onto those cars

[garf]

Video about laminar flow??? Someone call Destin from @smartereveryday.

[darthgorthaur]

My ex girlfriend actually did her master's in aerodynamic engineering and was aloud to use the Williams wind tunnel, she was working on a way to increase the max speed they could use rather than hit the make speed of the tunnel then extrapolating out from there because obviously they can't hit 300mh speeds with a wind tunnel...so they hit up to like 60-70 and then mathematically increase the speed to see what would happen....as such she was working on a way to make that obsolete and be able to get it up to actual race speed...she never could quite finish it before end of her course but Williams has carried on her work even to this day....as far as she's aware from talking to old friends who still worked there to recently and keeping track of the idea in mags an papers..

Edit: I haven't fully explained it very well in the post, I've just re read some bits and notice that...
There is another post lower down which explains it abit more an better, she wasn't trying to allow the tunnels to run at any faster speed she was trying to find a way to reduce the need for the mathematical guessing how a part would behave at the top end because of the limits of the tunnels.

[Echo]

Extreme liver challenge: Drink every time he says “airflow”

[nols]

In the f1 2020 my team the one bloke is litteraly running a leaf blower on the car

[amirsa]

As a project for our fluid dynamics class, i built a tiny wind tunnel, that was a very cool experience and I've learned a lot, design the wind tunnel and calculating drags, fan speed and ... Were so cool

[Thats_Mr_Random_Person_to_you]

Dunno about others but my gut suggests that wind tunnels will never be 100% phased out just because CFD is still based on 'approximations' so cannot tell the whole story alone.

That is to say the CFD calculations are computationally hard. And there does come a point where the software has to stop doing the calculations and say 'yh, thats a good enough approximation' otherwise you would be running the calculations for an infinite time. And with the inherent aspect of chaos theory (small varuations to initial conditions massivly changing the output) more accurate simulations require more computation of more 'particles' etc.. etc..

I may be wrong, but one huge benefit of wind tunnels is the ability to compare the real world with the CFD models, allowing to to verify the CFD calculations and make tweaks to the CFD calculations to better match the real world model.

It might be plausible that the CFD models become so good that the extremely tiny gains gained by verifying the data with the wind tunnel may not be worth the cost of doing so. But my gut tells me that in the race for 1/10th second gains, plus the F1 regulations evolving and changing to introduce challenges means its just unlikely.

[shyasaturtle]

I really like your videos, they are simple and easy to understand and condense complex topics into simple, easy to watch videos. Thank you so much for making these videos :)