Saturday, October 16, 2010

Brick myth

I'v heard claims about aerodynamics of a brick stone, yep, brick stone has it's own aerodynamics ofcourse. Not sure who really needs this information unless you try to invent some new sport out of it.. But anyway, when there are urban legends, I put my Mythbusters hat on my head and try solve and prove it to be wrong, that's what Mythbuster-guys are doing, so lets play Adam and Jamie for a while ;D. The claim says, that brick with only tail fairing has less drag than the brick with only front fairing.

My goal is not to do tests and get actual accurate results of a brick stone and publish that on a science magazine, that is unnecessary, not even making a wind tunnel out of soda pills and some fancy strain gauges to measure forces what Jamie and Adam would do.
I try to just show the magnitude of the differencies, with simulation tools, someone else can do more precise tests if wants so.

Here's my brick with a sharp nose/tale, air speed is the same at both cases, only air direction is changed 180 deg. Simulations were run with 3D part, here only showing 2D picture as a reference.

Results are nearly what they were in the case of my previous hemisphere test. Flat face towards the wind gave over two times more drag than the sharp face towards the wind, with numbers 1,6N vs. 0,7N.
I'd say that the myth of "flat face towards has less drag", is busted :D

2 comments:

  1. A rear fairing only works if it is inclines 20 degrees or less. You would probably get the same result as your rear "fairing" with a brick without fairing.

    Try running a test with a rear 3:1 spike instead

    ReplyDelete
  2. However, overall result would not change since the front causes the most of the drag.

    ReplyDelete

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