FINDING THE OPTIMUM ANGLE OF ATTACK FOR THE FRONT WING OF AN F1 CAR USING CFD

摘要

The F1 car is vehicle designed to obtain maximum speed across a race track. Earlier, the main mode for achieving speed was the development of engine but now aerodynamic forces - downforce and drag - are an object of concern by the team to achieve higher speeds. The 'drag' and 'downforce' are the two important forces governing the efficiency of a road vehicle. They influence the top straight line speed and cornering speed significantly for an F1 car. This in turn influences the performance of the car. The general design of the vehicle is such that lot of downforce is required to keep the car glued to the track.. The front wing, rear wing and the diffuser are the important components to achieve this. The front wing is supposed to generate about 25% of this 'downforce'. These forces are dependent on C{sub}L & C{sub}D which depend on the angle of attack. The paper uses a numerical approach to finding the variation of these parameters on angle of attack using the CFD software FLUENT. In the meshing software 'GAMBIT' the boundary conditions for the problem were specified as per the real problem analysis. The Reynold's number for this kind of flow is between 10{sup}6 to 3×10{sup}6. Hence, 'k-ε' model of turbulence was used. The results were correlated with previous results. Subsequently, the angle of attack was altered for obtaining the parameters at various angles to obtain the optimum angle of attack.