MAX Update No. 18: Defining Drag, Part 1

Reader Contribution by Staff
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If you have a bajillion dollars or a well-equipped university, you can determine a car’s aerodynamic drag in a wind tunnel. But you don’t, and neither do I, so we’ll have to do it on the cheap. Champagne science on a beer budget, that’s my motto.

Automotive wind tunnels work by blowing air at a measured speed over a stationary vehicle (or model) and measuring the forces (drag, lift and stability … doubtless the source of those tailfins that started appearing on American sedans in the ’50s) acting on the car via a number of scales under the tunnel floor.

It’s a fine way to do things, and is quite comfortable for the technicians, who sit in a room outside the tunnel, who can wander off for coffee, and who don’t have to worry about their notes blowing out of their pockets during the test.

For the MAX project, however, we’re using a moving car traveling through stationary air, which presents two obvious problems: How do we measure the speed and how do we measure the force?

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