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The mkiv Supra Owners Club

Frontal area


Digsy

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Oh, you comedians you. :)

 

Imagine you could put a projection screen on front of a Supra and then shine a light on it from behind. The area of the shaow it cast would be the frontal area.

 

Its essential to know this (and the Cd) if you are trying to work out power figures from vehicle speeds.

 

I have a figure of 1.98m^2, but that seems a bit low.

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Guest Terry S
Oh, you comedians you. :)

 

Imagine you could put a projection screen on front of a Supra and then shine a light on it from behind. The area of the shaow it cast would be the frontal area.

 

Its essential to know this (and the Cd) if you are trying to work out power figures from vehicle speeds.

 

I have a figure of 1.98m^2, but that seems a bit low.

 

What height is the projector, surely that will effect the shadow cast

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

:p

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If you're trying to work out power figures for modified cars using their speeds you could start by getting the figures for a stock car.

 

Get the average figures for a stock car , bhp and speed and put them in your equations and work backwards to get a constant which will be your frontal area and drag factor combined.

 

Cannot think of any reason why this won't work to give you approximate power figures.

 

I'm not too sure if it would be easy to do it that accurately, It wouldn't be simple working from first principles as there would be other unknowns such as car weight and varying tyre sizes resulting in increased rolling resistance and drag .

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Funny you should say that CJ. Have a look in the "thread killed at birth" thing in Off Topic and then try to believe I posted before I read your reply :p

 

Anyway, its people like me who give you crazy kids fast cars to play with so don't knock it! :D

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Any news on this Digsy?

 

I would be interested myself, as I am using an aerodynamic drag approximation for 'on the road' power measurements.

I'm doing the same thing.

 

When I get off my bum and go ouside with my tape measure, I'll post up a rough figure.

 

Alternatively, if someone could post up an "overall" dimension (like wheelbase, or width excluding mirrors or something) I'll scale it off the three-view that someone posted up a few weeks back.

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Sometime this evening I'll have my approx aero-drag figure (Cd x frontal)

I've also got a rolling resistance approximation.

Using the above and the vehicle weight, an accelerometer can figure out the max power produced during a run.

 

Not sure how it will compare to RR figures, but I doubt that it will be more bull, and at least the car will be loading as it's meant to, with airflow through the SMIC and the engine bay as it is meant to be in real life.

 

Obviously there will be no alt/temp correction and no graph thoughout the revs (not in my current version) but for assessing the effectiveness of modifications the max figure is good enough.

Only good on dry, windless days though --- but hey, it's relatively easy, quick and free!

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Only good on dry, windless days though --- but hey, it's relatively easy, quick and free!
It's also bloody hard to correlate. :(

 

I started working on this a few days ago after I got some usable results from the RR versus 1/4 mile timeslips survey. I have 5 sets of results to work from.

 

Assuming a 3m^2 frontal area, the best correlation I have so far is from Jake's results, which are practically spot on, although this will change when I plug in a real figure for frontal area.

Jake.zip

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