Racing cars used to be about big, fat, slick rubber tires and engine grease. In the last couple of decades, Formula 1 has become all about aerodynamics.
Although wings have been clamped onto Formula 1 cars since the late 1960s, today their development has become a science, the main tool of which is the wind tunnel. All teams now either own or rent wind tunnels, and some teams staff them 24 hours a day, seven days per week.
Principles of Car Aerodynamics
Unlike airplanes wings, which give lift, racing car wings point in the opposite direction to provide downforce. As its name implies, downforce presses the car to the track. This provides extra grip, particularly in cornering.
The Wind Tunnel Craze
To develop the car aerodynamics, teams spend an average of about $50 million to build a wind tunnel at their factory. It is one piece of equipment that separates the big budget teams at the front of the grid from the small budget teams at the back of the grid. As with airplane wind tunnels, a car wind tunnel is a massive tube joined at each end and with fans producing airflow. From an operating room beside the tunnel, a team’s aerodynamics engineers monitor a model of the Formula 1 car and study the computer signals that define the way it reacts. Rather than moving the model - most are half the size of the real car, but some use full-scale models - the wind moves over the car wings as if the car were traveling at a given speed.
The Engineers Behind the Wind
The wind tunnel is the play area of both aerodynamics engineers and specialists in a branch of aerodynamics called computational fluid dynamics. This is a form of computer analysis that uses a computer representation of the effect of the wind on the car. It helps the engineers to see how effective the wings are and where the main areas of turbulence lie. The data is sometimes processed in a supercomputer, also owned by the team.
The engineers snap on wings and other pieces of the chassis to the model car, trying out new designs or refining existing ones. They create a constant supply of changing parts by using a form of three-dimensional computer printing called stereolithography. A designer draws the new part on a computer, then prints it to a machine that uses resin to construct the model part. The resin hardens into a kind of plastic, and the new part is tested in the wind tunnel within hours.
The Final Step, When the Wings Begin to Fly
The aim is to create parts with the most grip and the least amount of drag, or friction, to slow the car. Once the engineers feel that they have the best wing or chassis part they transfer the design to another department of the Formula 1 factory where the actual, real part is made out of carbon fiber at full size for the car. It is then tested on the real car by the test team at a track between races.
And so it goes on forever, as these aerodynamics and computational fluid dynamics engineers - who usually have PhDs and come from the aerospace industry - invent thousands of new parts throughout the season.
Formula One, abbreviated to F1, and in modern times also known as Grand Prix motor racing, is the highest class of open wheeledauto racing defined by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), motorsport world’s governing body. The “formula” in the name refers to a set of rules to which all participants and cars must conform. The F1 world championship season consists of a series of races, known as Grands Prix, held usually on purpose-built circuits, and in a few cases on closed city streets, the most famous of which is the Monaco Grand Prix in Monte Carlo. The results of each race are combined to determine two annual World Championships, one for drivers and one for constructors.
The cars race at high speeds, up to 360 km/h (225 mph), and are capable of pulling up to 5g in some corners. The performance of the cars is highly dependent on electronics, aerodynamics, suspension and tyres. The formula has seen many evolutions and changes through the history of the sport.
Europe is Formula One’s traditional centre; all of the teams are based there and around half the races take place there. In particular the United Kingdom has produced the most number of Drivers’ Champions (12), and the vast majority of Constructors’ Champions (32). However, its scope has expanded significantly in recent years and Grands Prix are now held all over the world. Events in Europe and the Americas have been dropped in favour of new ones in Bahrain, China, Malaysia and Turkey, with Singapore scheduled to hold the first night race in 2008 and India being added to the schedule starting in 2010. Of the eighteen races in 2008, nine are outside Europe.
It is a massive television event, with millions of people watching each race worldwide. As the world’s most expensive sport,[citation needed] its economic effect is significant, and its financial and political battles are widely observed. On average about 55 million people all over the world watch Formula One races live. Its high profile and popularity makes it an obvious merchandising environment, which leads to very high investments from sponsors, translating into extremely high budgets for the constructor teams. Several teams have gone bankrupt or been bought out by other companies since 2000.
Cars
Modern Formula One cars are mid-engined open cockpit, open wheel single-seaters. The chassis is made largely of carbon fibre composites, rendering it light but extremely stiff and strong. The whole car, including engine, fluids and driver, weighs only 600kg. In fact this is the minimum weight set by the regulations – the cars are so light that they often have to be ballasted up to this minimum weight. The race teams take advantage of this by placing this ballast at the extreme bottom of the chassis, thereby locating the centre of gravity as low as possible in order to improve handling and weight transfer.[46]
The cornering speed of Formula One cars is largely determined by the aerodynamic downforce that they generate, which pushes the car down onto the track. This is provided by ‘wings’ mounted at the front and rear of the vehicle, and by ground effect created by low pressure air under the flat bottom of the car. The aerodynamic design of the cars is very heavily constrained to limit performance and the current generation of cars sport a large number of small winglets, ‘barge boards’ and turning vanes designed to closely control the flow of the air over, under and around the car.
The other major factor controlling the cornering speed of the cars is the design of the tyres. As of 2008, tyres in Formula One are not ‘slicks‘ (tyres with no tread pattern) as in most other circuit racing series. Each tyre has had four large circumferential grooves on its surface designed to limit the cornering speed of the cars.[47] Slick tyres will return to Formula One in the 2009 season. Suspension is double wishbone or multilink all round with pushrod operated springs and dampers on the chassis. Carbon-Carbondisc brakes are used for reduced weight and increased frictional performance. These provide a very high level of braking performance and are usually the element which provokes the greatest reaction from drivers new to the formula.
Engines are mandated as 2.4 litre naturally aspirated V8s, with many other constraints on their design and the materials that may be used. The 2006 generation of engines spun up to 20,000 rpm and produced up to 780 bhp (582 kW).[48] Engines run on unleaded fuel closely resembling publicly available petrol. [49] The oil which lubricates and protects the engine from overheating is very similar in viscosity to water. For 2007 the V8 engines are restricted to 19,000 rpm with limited development areas allowed, following the engine specification freeze from the end of 2006. [50]
A wide variety of technologies – including active suspension, ground effectaerodynamics and turbochargersMonza).[51] A Honda Formula One car, running with minimum downforce on a runway in the Mojave desert achieved a top speed of 415 km/h (258 mph) in 2006. According to Honda the car fully met the FIA Formula One regulations.[52] Even with the limitations on aerodynamics, at 160 km/h aerodynamically generated downforce is equal to the weight of the car and the often repeated claim that Formula One cars create enough downforce to ‘drive on the ceiling’ remains true in principle, although it has never been put to the test. At full speed downforce of two and a half times the car’s weight can be achieved. The downforce means that the cars can achieve a lateral force of up to five times the force of gravity (5 “g”) in cornering – a high-performance road car like the Ferrari Enzo only achieves around 1 “g”.[53] Consequently in corners the driver’s head is pulled sideways with a force equivalent to 20kg. Such high lateral forces are enough to make breathing difficult and the drivers need supreme concentration and fitness to maintain their focus for the one to two hours that it takes to cover 305km. – are banned under the current regulations. Despite this the 2006 generation of cars can reach speeds of up to 350 km/h (around 220 mph) at some circuits (
F1 car is made up of 80,000 components, if it were assembled 99.9% correctly, it would still start the race with 80 things wrong!
When an F1 driver hits the brakes on his car he experiences retardation or deceleration comparable to a regular car driving through a BRICK wall at 300kmph!
F1 car can go from 0 to 160 kph AND back to 0 in FOUR seconds!
F1 car engines last only for about 2 hours of racing mostly before blowing up on the other hand we expect our engines to last us for a decent 20yrs on an average and they quite faithfully DO… that’s the extent to which the engines are pushed to perform…
An average F1 driver looses about 4kgs of weight after just one race due to the prolonged exposure to high G forces and temperatures for little over an hour.
At 550kg a F1 car is less than half the weight of a Mini.
To give you an idea of just how important aerodynamic design and added down force can be, small planes can take off at slower speeds than F1 cars travel on the track.
Without aerodynamic down force, high-performance racing cars have sufficient power to produce wheel spin and loss of control at 160 kph. They usually race at over 300 kph.
To give you an idea of just how important aerodynamic design and added down force can be, small planes can take off at slower speeds than F1 cars travel on the track.
Without aerodynamic down force, high-performance racing cars have sufficient power to produce wheel spin and loss of control at 160 kph. They usually race at over 300 kph.
In a street course race like the Monaco grand prix, the down force provides enough suction to lift manhole covers. Before the race all of the manhole covers on the streets have to be welded down to prevent this from happening!
The refuelers used in F1 can supply 12 liters of fuel per second. This means it would take just 4 seconds to fill the tank of an average 50 liter family car. They use the same refueling rigs used on US military helicopters today.
The 2008 Driver
The full 2008 Formula One World Championship entry list:
Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro
1. Kimi Raikkonen
2. Felipe Massa
BMW-Sauber F1 Team
3. Nick Heidfeld
4. Robert Kubica
ING Renault F1 Team
5. Fernando Alonso
6. Nelson Piquet Jr.
AT&T Williams
7. Nico Rosberg
8. Kazuki Nakajima
Red Bull Racing
9. David Coulthard
10. Mark Webber
Panasonic Toyota Racing
11. Jarno Trulli
12. Timo Glock
Scuderia Toro Rosso
14. Sebastien Bourdais
15. Sebastian Vettel
Honda Racing F1 Team
16. Jenson Button
17. Rubens Barrichello
Super Aguri F1 Team
18. Takuma Sato
19. Anthony Davidson
Force India Formula One Team
20. Adrian Sutil
21. TBA
Vodafone McLaren Mercedes
22. Lewis Hamilton
23. Heikki Kovalainen
Pico power: This tiny processor, called the Phoenix, uses 90 percent less energy than the most efficient chip on the market today. It could enable implantable medical sensors powered by tiny batteries.
Credit: Mingoo Seok
Before long, sensors may be implanted in our bodies to do things like measure blood-glucose levels in diabetics or retinal pressure in glaucoma patients. But to be practical, they’ll have to both be very small–as tiny as a grain of sand–and use long-lasting batteries of similarly small size, a combination not commercially available today.
Now researchers at the University of Michigan have made a processor that takes up just one millimeter square and whose power consumption is so low that emerging thin-film batteries of the same size could power it for 10 years or more, says David Blaauw, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Michigan and one of the lead researchers on the project.
But when this processor, dubbed the Phoenix, is coupled with a battery, the whole package would only be a cubic millimeter in volume. At this scale, Blaauw says, it could be feasible to build the chip into a thick contact lens and use it to monitor pressure in the eye, which would be useful for glaucoma detection. It could also be implanted under the skin to sense glucose levels in subcutaneous fluid. More broadly, this low-power approach to processor design could be used in environmental sensors that monitor pollution, or structural health sensors, for instance.
The processer uses only about 30 picowatts (a picowatt is one-millionth of one-millionth of a watt) of power when idle. When active, the processor consumes only 2.8 picojoules of energy per computing cycle. That amount is about a tenth of the energy used by the most energy-efficient chips on the market, says Jan Rabaey, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the research.
The Michigan team’s main idea was to design a chip that runs at an extremely low voltage. While microprocessors for personal computers may require two volts of electricity per operation, the Phoenix only needs 500 millivolts, or 75 percent less.
At this voltage, parts of the chip don’t operate well, explains Blaauw, so his team redesigned the chip’s memory, which is smaller than most processor memory, and its internal clock so that it could operate with minimal electrical input. The chip’s clock–the timepiece that synchronizes number-crunching operations–has been reduced to an extremely slow rate of 100 kilohertz, as opposed to the gigahertz rates of personal computers. This approach makes sense for sensors, says Blaauw. “If we wanted to monitor pressure in the eye . . . we only need to take readings every few minutes,” he says.
Additionally, the researchers paid close attention to the energy loss that occurs while the chip is in sleep mode, or not collecting or processing data. Transistors in the newest computers are made using a 45-nanometer process in which features on a chip are 45 nanometers in size. While this allows for more transistors on a smaller chip, it also results in electrical leakage, due to the physics of the materials at this scale. Blaauw and his team opted for larger transistors made using a 180-nanometer process, from a previous generation of chips. These transistors are in a “sweet spot,” says Blaauw. They are big enough to have minimal leakage and yet small enough for the researchers to fit a large number on a one-millimeter-square chip.
To further minimize leakage, the researchers added special transistors that completely shut off the power supply to the processing transistors when the chip is in standby mode. This is a common approach, says Blaauw, but his team took it to the extreme and dedicated much more of the chip than usual to these “power-gating” transistors. “If a normal [chip] designer would look at this, he’d say, ‘You’re out of your mind,’” Blaauw says. “But it gives us the power-savings trade-off we need.” In sum, the researchers combined a number of already existing tricks and fine-tuned them to achieve the record-breaking low power consumption.
The Michigan team, which is also led by Dennis Sylvester, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, still must add a battery to the Phoenix, and it needs to develop a way for data to be offloaded from the chip for further analysis. Once this is done, the researchers can work on full integration within a biological system, which could take years.
Berkeley’s Rabaey, who is writing a book on low-power processors, says that the work is significant. “What has impressed me is that they’ve driven this to quite extreme numbers,” he says. “The energy consumption is extremely low. Nobody else has come even close to this.” Rabaey notes that this processor is intended for specialty sensor applications and that it won’t show up in a cell phone anytime soon. However, it’s an important step toward building implantable medical sensors whose batteries can last for years.
The idea of this low voltage chip is not new, says Rabaey: it’s been used successfully in the watch industry for decades. But within the past few years, academic and industry interest in such design has blossomed as engineers are exploring more varied and ubiquitous uses of sensors, devices that require energy-saving tricks in order to be practical.
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