Aston Martin AMR22 - Aerodynamics Analysis and Initial Thoughts

after the disappointment of red bull's launch with its repainted show car aston martin has given us a real cracker of a launch with a full real car and also a whole bunch of very detailed renders that we can use to analyze all the different aerodynamic components on the car in this video we're going to look at all the different error features of interest on the car and discuss potential aero intensifies areas and what they could be doing down the car for those of you that are new to my channel i was on an aerodynamicist for mercedes for the 2018 19 and 20 formula one seasons and now i work as an aerodynamic consultant designing aero kits for race cars in all different classes all around the world now this of course is not a race one car we don't know what changes they're going to make coming to the first race there's certainly a lot of really interesting details and there's a lot of stuff that i think they will carry forwards into certainly testing and most likely the early races there's also a few things that are definitely cheeky on legality and so we'll run a bit through those and talk about where they've really been pushing the rules to the absolute limits let's waste no more time and get straight into the front to back analysis of the car okay to start with the front wing you'll note that the first element of the front wing is separated off the front and then everything else is cleanly mated into the nose now on face value there's not a dissimilar set up to the hearts but it's actually a little bit different in how the nose mates itself if you have a look the front leading edge of the front element comes in really on the front of the nose it blends in almost perfectly with the front of the nose and if you have a look at this bit here you'll see that the trailing edge mates perfectly up to where the nose is on the underside this will actually give a really clean under nose profile because what you've probably got is where the wing goes into the nose the curvature of the nose would match almost perfectly the curvature of the the underside of the wing element so that's a really nice way of doing it and you avoid any sort of notches like the the house had to run where you had the um the little kick ups there and there where it had to to mate to its nose it's a a pretty clean way of doing the junction and a pretty smooth way of doing it now one of the things you really notice with this particular front wing is how high the center is with respect to legality particularly compared to the likes of the hearts but it is quite a high front wing in the center so you have a look i've overlaid my own little drawing of a legality box here and you can see that the the wing is on legality at the leading edge on the outboard portion more or less and then it sort of comes up in the center and then we've got this higher center section there now that high really backed off center section is going to give you really nice clean airflow through here which is going to come through and hit the forward floor and the the t tray or bib area that we'll talk a bit about later now the compromise for this is that you lose a bit of load uh in the center section by not cranking it as much so you have to regain that load elsewhere if you follow the the trailing edge of the the rearward most element along you'll see that it matches the profile legality box very closely uh in that sort of mid to outboard portion over here um so they've obviously really had to crank the wing there the front's almost legality the backs almost as high as possible this cranking has possibly cost them in terms of k10 management they might have a bit less downwash onto their cake tin deflectors and things like that it might be a bit less clean flow getting to the caked in perhaps there's there's a bit of low awake management that's lost as a result of that but that may be the trade they're choosing to go for where they can get that really nice clean flow in the center instead where that perhaps is more profitable for them another real feature to note is this divot that we've got going on through here so you can see they've come off legality here with this divot that cuts down now it has to guess that they they're doing basically what i spoke about in the last video which is they're going to try and and shed a little bit of sheet vorticity along here try and spool up a little bit of a vortex and then beyond that the inboard section has to come up so that it can mate nicely uh with the bodywork and the nose junction through there so i'd say that's what they're doing there and on the subject of that vorticity and vortex shedding along there they've done something very cheeky with their little flap adjuster so while haas was doing this to a smaller extent aston has really taken it to the next level where they've taken their separator where their flat pivots and they've put this giant relatively giant given the the rules in the location a delta winglet on top of the the last element of the front wing now this is going to shed a vortex off the back of it which will propagate downstream they've obviously used it for some form of flow control further downstream use it from somewhere to cast off the vorticity in a defined location i couldn't tell you exactly what they're using it for but that is almost certainly going to cast a nice big vortex off it another thing to note with the size and positioning of the front wing is how much the legality box it fills up you can see in this overlay that i've done of the legality boxes that the the front wing box is basically fully filled by the front wing so they're really maximizing that legality space and trying to maximize the load generating potential of the front wing which of course feeds back into what i was earlier saying about backing off the center so that you can get the clean flow there because they can back that off and still have the plan form available to make that all up on the subject of plan form you'll note that the two forward elements are significantly larger than the two rearwards elements now some of this is probably uh structural the the middle element is where the bulk of the structure is going to be uh because you're you're going to end up with that structure being passed into the nose cone there whereas the the thinner or shorter cord rearward elements will not carry as much structure because they'll be pivoting flaps and the like the front element doesn't mate in to to the nose itself so it has to pass all its load out into this second element here in addition to that there's every chance that they may have found some form of aerodynamic cleanup by going to the two front elements being long cord and the two rear elements being short cord that may have just been a very aerodynamically efficient way of powering up the wing i spoke a bit about the front flap pivot being a fairly cheeky interpretation of the rules but they've actually gotten a lot cheekier on this car and the first thing that i spotted was this particular tea tree area now the cars are allowed to have a tea tree or the bib you'll note on the haas it's a fairly conventional thing the main column of the bodywork goes down into the bib and then it fills into the bib all nice and conventional but when we look really close on the aston what we see is there's actually two t-trays essentially stacked on top of each other and this is at least from my interpretation the rules not exactly how the fia intended it and let's explain why the rules state that you define two different bodies you define yourself a floor volume it will look something like that back here and then you define yourself a uh a bib volume which will be some sort of shape that will look something like that now the requirements on these bodies are fairly well laid out the floor is allowed a minimum radius of 25 millimeters at any point so a pretty big radius on it the bib is allowed a 15 millimeter radius at any point when viewed from the top however when you get to the edge you can run much sharper radii just so you can get the sharp corner down and have a shedding edge on the edge of the bit both of these volumes must be a single volume with no aperture and then both of them when you look from the bottom and the top you must be able to see the whole volume so this means that basically for example with the bib you couldn't go for something like this because from the top or the bottom you wouldn't be able to see this bit in here now once you've defined these two two particular volumes you're allowed to join them with a fillet of up to 50 millimeters and i think that what fia was thinking with that was that you'd have your bib you'd have your body and then you'd put some sort of fillet like that in now the thing with the fia regs is that they say that a fillet radius no greater than 50 millimeters may be applied along the periphery of where these volumes intersect they don't actually specify how small it can be nor do they specify its convexity or its concavity and i wonder if what the the aston guys are interpreting it as is they can apply any fillet radius along there so they've built essentially uh 50 ml say fill it out and they've got a sharp fill it around and then another fill it back um and that's how they're getting their their basically second t train there i had a quick play in cad and i couldn't get a geometry that would would be perfectly legal but they have a lot more resource on this than me just having a very quick stab at it and so they probably have been able to get up a solution that they could at the very least argue the fia is legal but it's certainly a very interesting and very cheeky interpretation of the rules if it is in fact valid now in terms of what the aerodynamic intent of this the secondary uh t tray could be well there's two vortices that are going to spool off the sides of the bib normally and depending on whether this is an up washing or or down washing t tray and extension here i can't tell because i don't have the local flow direction but if it was an upwashing winglet so the flow was say coming down and the winglet is trying to push it up it could weaken the shedding strength of the vortices at the bottom and shed a new set of vortices up high splitting these vortex strengths can help clean the whole system up while still maintaining decent power it's particularly good if you're really desperately trying to clean an overpowered floor vortex system there or alternatively if it was down washing what it could do is that if the air was say coming straight and the the teacher was angled down it would produce extra pressure at the front here and that would force the the vortices of the bib to be generated stronger and harder so that would be a good solution if they were underpowered and you saw more performance getting more power and you might be able to get a counter rotating vortex structure so a vortex shedding the opposite way off the top either way they must have found performance in it because otherwise there's no way that they would be running a device that would be potentially contentious now moving back let's talk a little bit about the strikes now these pictures are a little bit blurry and i apologize for that but you've got to work with what you've got but basically as far as i can tell there are four strikes there's the outboard fence and then you've got one two three there so four strikes all up arranged in a side-by-side format going on there i'm not going to speculate too much on how that four-strake layout is playing out but i assume that it works for them but i think what's more interesting to talk about is their outer strike which is kind of a bit like a barge board it goes pretty much the whole way forwards to legality and it's got quite a substantial cant on it when you look at that angle there it's really lent out at the top and pulled in at the bottom but i imagine that those things this strike is potentially telling us one is it could be related to the wake shape on the car if they don't perhaps have a huge amount of lower weight control i know there's the fia deflector there but maybe it's somewhat compromised with that that outboard cranked front wing the wake could be finding its way a bit inboard and they could be prioritizing try and drive it back outboard so cutting that in there would give a little bit of extra clearance to help kick the wake further upwards rather than if you ran it straight up and down like that and then what could happen is that you could ingest a bit of wake on the inboard side which you don't really want you'd rather keep it all outboard another thing to note on the strikes in the top view is is that they are not actually present ahead of the leading edge of the floor now first i thought they might be removed from the render but if you have a look at some of the other render shots they are definitely in there and when you have a look at where they're positioned on the full-size real-life shots they might not be there on that either so i'm thinking they actually start back here somewhere and maybe that's why they've gone with four strokes set up because it's four shorter strikes and maybe they need to run the the three full length strikes in terms of full length to the back of the box here in order to power up the vortices they need let's talk a bit about that side pod which is one of the more interesting design features on the car at the front they've rammed it right up to the legality box and i'll show you what this looks like on a top view this is a comparison to the house here and you can see the hus has their inlets about here it's fairly tight on their mirror there the aston is much further forwards to there and you can see the outboard portion of their side pod is really rammed up there basically the legality box goes flat here and then angles back there and they've really pushed it right up as hard as they can get it there that's resulted in the flat face squished bit here now it's worth noting that the side pod doesn't go outwards all the way to legality they've kept it in a bit so perhaps they're worried about that mid-weight latching onto the bodywork and they've just pulled in a little bit to make sure that it's clear of the tie awake and the tire weight can sail down the side of the car without touching the bodywork the other thing this has allowed them to do is put an absolutely monstrous undercut under here if you follow along this bright green line with your eye what you can see is that this side pod basically gets cut fully underneath there and then it purely down washes on its own there's actually a complete air gap underneath there all the way back to pretty much the tub it looks like now there's two reasons i can think of why you'd want to do this one is that the floor leading edge is down washing quite aggressively on the top surface so you could end up with some losses and separations on the top surface that could go downstream and you don't really want that by having this acting as basically a down washing wing over the top of it we can end up with some overall down wash and we end up with some support of this area so the losses don't expand and become too big keeps it from separating and therefore we can get nice clean flow downstream the other thing it can do is that any clean flow that we have from upstream in the center of the wing because we talked a lot about how the center of the wing is probably feeding very nice clean flow along the center line any flow there we can really capitalize on the fact that we've got nice high energy flow and we can keep that attached to our coke line keep all our cooling stuff above there and this means that we can get that high energy air down and into the rear caked in and the top of the rear diffuser on the side of the rear diffuser maybe even a little bit to the beam wing and that can power up a lot of the critical devices at the rear end i personally think that's a really innovative solution and i'm excited to see how it performs it also looks like it biases a little bit of the outwash of the the undercut back to this region here where maybe they can drive a little bit more outwash into this region of the floor where they've got this flap that's a little bit longer than the harsh one and they've got the rearward section of the the flap is quite loaded with a little gurney flap so maybe they're using that to drive a little bit more outwash there get a little bit more upwash off the flap and therefore get a little bit more suction and extraction from the forward floor it's also worth noting that the front flap or the wing flap that they're allowed on the edge of the floor is missing from this car now whether or not they've elected to not use it i find that unlikely or more likely is that they have an innovative way of using it and don't want to show it off yet so i think that will be a very interesting thing to watch for testing in race one so have they achieved this overall effect well i mean obviously they've they've got their inlet high and inboard and their massive width side part at the front right at the front legality obviously not full legality and then what they're doing is that they probably have some variant of more or less a horizontal or similar radiator and then they have all their venting in this brand new legality box up here that i talked about in the last video where they're allowed to have these gills and vent out over the top now this venting could do two things one is is that it will increase the the losses up high so your rear wing might get hurt a bit although maybe the rear wing box is big enough for that it's okay the other thing it could do is is that it could help detach any latch to wake if we had any wake come onto the bodywork and latch on this vent could help detach it maybe it would kick it up and out board away from the rear wing very hard to know for sure but what i'd say is in general this is probably a compromise of hurting the performance of the rear wing slightly in exchange for a fairly sizable performance gain down at the bottom of the diffuser beam wing and caked in and all this means that we get this really tiny central airflow exit in the center there much smaller than we've seen in previous years now just be to to get a little bit of cooling air past the the exhaust the headers the engine stuff like that so really looking at maximizing performance of the the lower car systems there it is worth noting though that venting losses upstream does have problems with respect to loss up there can be a little bit less controlled because it's got a longer distance to move downstream so there's more chance that it could drift around particularly in any sort of cornering or your crosswind condition where the losses could move a little bit more than if you vent them at the rear which is obviously a bit more controlled now before we get too far rearwards let's talk a little bit about the kick lines and the diffuser so what we've got here is it looks like quite a prominent secondary kick along there so it looks like they're down probably on the bottom limit of legality along here going along a fairly sharp kick there so we have a kick along there a flatten which i imagine is going to be at the top of legality and then a kick running along what is presumably the top of legality as well what this sort of geometry will do is it will improve your suction here because you've got a kick line here so you'll get a bit of extraction through here a bit of suction here that will propagate forwards and then you'll get more kick and suction along here by keeping this section low they can maximize the the effect of the ground proximity through that portion of the tunnel you don't necessarily want that bit to be as high as it is so that that solution makes quite a bit of sense to me now there was one solution that i spotted that at first i wasn't sure if i was actually seeing it but it looks like it's actually quite an interesting solution so out of the end we've got this tiny little curl up that's all well and good i expect a few teams to be running a detail similar to that to be getting a little bit of load and a little bit of loss into the contact patch of the rear tyre but then as you go a little bit further inboard it looks like we actually have a cut up in the sidewall and then it goes down into a notch more or less like that on the diffuser sidewall and at first i saw it on on these shots and i wasn't sure if it was just an artifact of enhancing the image but i had a look at some other renders and it's very much real if you look at this you can see the exact geometry i described a flat section here going up and then coming down like that along the side wall so what they're doing here most likely is is that they're going to induce some nice clean mass flow from there into the diffuser and really help spool up a clean vortex along the edge of the the sidewall so instead of getting a messy junction going on in this particular corner with a sharp corner and a whole bunch of losses they've just cast any water seize from the tunnel off into the diffuser and they've they've gone and started a brand new sidewall strike if you will that is i think quite a very clean and nice way of doing it and i wouldn't be surprised to see a few different teams running that solution while at the back here you can also see they're running that same sort of trumpet to exit style diffuser so with the with the sharp rear corner and a slightly wider fillet radius further upstream similar to what the haas had i would expect this to be a pretty standard feature higher up we have a dual element beam wing up here as opposed to the single element we spoke about before now i had suspicions that a single would be sufficient uh obviously they've gone for a long chord first element followed by a shorter chord second element i think there's going to be a really interesting avenue to see what teams choose what for here it's worth noting that the the second element of the the aston layout can actually go and carry on through underneath the exhaust as opposed to a single beam element layout that's all for this analysis thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe to my channel for more content like this stay tuned for the next ones coming up in the series as further f1 cars launch and i get those out and hopefully i'll see you next time

Channel: KYLE.ENGINEERS

Views: 222,153

Keywords:

Id: 8n-1P86CGzU

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/vlike19]

Underrated channel. Just found out about it yesterday and I'm already binge watching his past uploads.

[u/danteilyas]

Kyle is quickly becoming one of my favorite f1 YouTubers! Great to have someone with contemporary f1 experience putting out quality content like this.

[u/fiah84]

very interesting!

[u/deathray1611]

Yo this is brilliant content

[u/Seven2572]

Considering the whole Pink W10 facade with Racing point in 2020, Kyle technically helped design an RP/AM car as he worked on the aero for the W10

[u/doenr]

2009 we got the double diffuser, this year it's the double t tray.

Maybe.

[u/nyperfox]

OOH I can't wait for his mclaren one now too

[u/dgkimpton]

Finally, someone who can give a clear, understandable, and credible analysis without all the hype. Super channel, thanks for sharing!