A Strategy for Optimum Surveys of Passenger-Car Flow Fields

The paper summarizes various flow-field survey techniques which have been developed at Pininfarina in recent years to analyse the flow field around cars in the wind tunnel.

Some of these techniques are now fully integrated into wind tunnel everyday work. Among them, the “14-hole probe” technique has been recently upgraded by the development of two new “micro-drag” and “vorticity” maps.

The paper describes the most recent advances in these techniques and, mainly, the strategy employed in the Pininfarina wind tunnel to maximize the usefulness of the information obtained about a car flow-field with a minimum of wind tunnel run-time.

The core of this strategy is the choice of a carefully chosen set of planar surveys carried out around the car in the most critical areas, so that a complete overview of the whole car flow-field can be achieved.