Model behaviour

Wind tunnel testing has a fascinating history, beginning in the aerospace industry. As testing methods became more sophisticated and laboratory testing evolved, a need was identified to provide a method of validating design concepts. The Wright brothers were the first to achieve controlled flight as they built a tunnel to calibrate the characteristics of wing profiles and showed that the accepted characteristics were wrong.

However, few tunnels existed that would be capable of managing a 1:1 scale prototype. Aerospace engineers quickly figured out there were many advantages to preparing scale models. Namely, it enabled testing to take place at all, but furthermore cost, materials use and build times were slashed when compared to full-size prototypes.

Cars by their very nature operate close to, and in contact with, the ground, so automotive wind tunnels differ substantially in design to aerospace ones. A moving ground plane and effective boundary layer control are critical features but, in the early days of automotive wind tunnel testing, these weren’t available to full-size models. The concept of scale models within automotive and motorsport testing was therefore born out of similar necessity to aerospace.

A modern automotive wind tunnel’s principal function is to accurately recreate the motion of a car driving on a road surface. The key difference experimentally, however, is that you are moving the air over the vehicle, rather than moving the vehicle through the air. At a minimum this requires the presence of a relative air velocity over the car body, and a moving ground plane to simulate the asphalt passing beneath.

Matched relationship

The relationship between tunnel and model is a valuable point of learning as they must be matched in order to create a suitable test environment. So, from an engineering point of view, the particular tunnel facilities available for a project tend to decide the maximum scale of model used. Let’s explore what that means in practice.

When testing in any wind tunnel you have a fixed cross-sectional area. Naturally, the presence of a test model introduces a flow constriction into the tunnel. The presence of the flow constriction can manifest in two ways – either as a solid blockage, attributed to the frontal area of the vehicle, or wake blockage, which occurs when the dispersion of turbulent wake from the body is impinged by the roof and side walls of the tunnel. The design of the tunnel does have influence