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Technical Paper

Assessing the Effects of Shear and Turbulence During the Dynamic Testing of the Crosswind Sensitivity of Road Vehicles

1997-02-24
970135
With increasing speeds and the anticipated reduction in weight of modern cars, the issue of crosswind sensitivity is becoming increasingly important. In a previous paper by the same authors, the normal method of testing such aerodynamic characteristics at model scale, using static models at yaw to the freestream, was compared with dynamic testing, in which the model is propelled across a ‘gust’ simulated by a wind tunnel. A direct comparison using a similar gust profile for both static and dynamic tests was made with the conclusion that the simple static test technique was underestimating the true transient loads. Further tests have been carried out, on a generic squareback (or estate) model, during which the effect of varying both the vertical velocity profile and the turbulence intensity within the gust was considered.
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