Advanced Engineering Blog

Hello Everybody, Flight Testing is a very extensive and demanding phase of development of an Aircraft. There is no way to see if the predicted models of the Aircraft used at development stages of the aircraft is accurate unless you perform Flight Testing. Before the construction of the prototype, data gathered from simulations (Computational Fluid Dynamics, simulations of 6 degrees of freedom of aircraft, etc), wind tunnel testing, bibliography and isolated system testing is all that the Engineering team has to predict how the Aircraft will behavior when operating. Fig. 1 - An Aircraft properly instrumented for Flight Testing However, there must be flight testing to get the real data of the aircraft, in order to refine/update aircraft models and simulations. This is possible due to planned aircraft maneuvers and the extensive use of instrumentation at the aircraft. Instruments like DGPS, accelerometers, rate gyros, anemometric system, instrumented flight control system, etc, must...

Hello Everybody At the previous post, I talked about the first motorsport cars with aerodynamics generating downforce. This downforce helped the car to gain lateral acceleration in cornering, increasing cornering speed. The gains with regular front and rear wing design were not converging into the best configuration, until Colin Chapman developed the first ground effect car: the Lotus 78 (see details of this introduction into the previous article here ). At this point, when Lotus 78 ground effect car was developed, the need for ground effect downforce in Formula one (and also other categories) were the rule of a competitive car. The Lotus 79 (evolution of Lotus 78) was so dominant that every competitor tried to develop his Ground Effect car his own (not only at Formula One, but also at other categories in motorsport, like Indycars and so on). Figure 1 - Lotus 79 Ground Effect Cat. The Evolution of Lotus 78 car that dominated the 1978 F1 season The fight for finding downforce at the bod...

Hello Everybody,  Everyone that loves Motorsport is amazed about how complex is the aerodynamics of a Formula or Prototype car nowadays. Everything that is contained at bodywork design is there for some aerodynamic purpose, which is (in summary) to increase downforce (negative lift force) and decrease drag force, and normally they are made of carbon fiber (with some parts made with carbon fiber mixed with aluminum honeycomb).  Fig. 1 - Modern F1 car (2022 concept) at Wind Tunnel testing All of these development came from the interaction of Aeronautical Engineering with Motorsport Engineering, when Motorsport Engineers started to figure out the gains that they could obtain into the car performance with the help of aerodynamics. Even if there were airplanes flying at the world since 1903 and the technologies of aerodynamics being very well studied since them, did you know that aerodynamics just started to play a role in Motorsport just at the end of 1960's and its methodologies ...