Ford finds out a way to improve fuel efficiency
The American automaker can improve its vehicles’ fuel efficiency by using a wind tunnel technique to add to its customers.
In the previous many years aerodynamic development has turned out to be a highly significant part of the automobile design process. Cutting down the force needed to push a vehicle’s body through the air has tangible advantages to provide fuel efficiency. When done in the right manner, it also has an additional benefit of cutting down the amount of air noise heard in the automobile’s cabin while running.
Conventionally, the wind tunnel has been amongst the most significant tools in this procedure, but taking a vehicle is a time consuming and expensive process so the American automaker has pioneered means to take the tunnel to the vehicles. A full-size automotive wind tunnel is like the vehicle maker’s plant in the city of Allen Park, in Michigan can cost a price of $50 million to develop and feature giant vanes and ducts to make sure that there’s a turbulence- free flow, uniform flow of wind through the test section.
It is packed with quite sensitive equipment capable of doing detection of the impact of highly subtle changes in the body shape. It is an invaluable component of the design procedure. Apart from testing development prototypes and clay models, initial production instances of refreshed or new vehicles delivered to the wind tunnel for the purpose of evaluation. While the vehicle shape is not going to be altered at this time in the procedure, wind tunnel car testing plucked from the factory’s assembly line can help find out potential manufacturing issues. During the process of development, the measurement of sound levels and placement of acoustic dummies in the vehicle seats where humans would listen to them by their ears.
This data is employed is used to play a role in designing the body panels shape and seals around doors and windows. Leaky seals and misaligned panels can raise noise to objectionable levels while driving, particularly at higher levels of speeds. Unfortunately a delivering a vehicle to the core wind tunnel and establishing for testing is an expensive and time consuming procedure. It also consumes an amount of time that could be spent to develop next generation automobiles.
This led engineers of Ford to build a mobile aero acoustic wind tunnel. As per reports by USA Today, the sales of Ford automobiles in US increased by 4% in the last month due to increasing discounts and larger automobiles which gave dealerships a boost. In April, an average Ford vehicle was offered at a discount of 24%. It could be said that by using the wind tunnel the automaker will be able to increase its sales by offering greater fuel efficiency to its customers in the competitive market.
