Measuring and Improving Cooling System Performance – Part 1: Overview
Modern car shapes are approaching the limits of low drag, were it not for details such as wheels, drivelines, suspensions, brakes, and cooling. This is good news for home modifiers. If your starting point is a car with a good basic shape, such as a Prius (as opposed to a car with a horrible basic shape, like my pickup), things like wheel drag and cooling system drag are likely responsible for a larger fraction of overall aerodynamic drag. These areas, then, are good targets for drag reduction. In the next few posts, I’ll address the cooling system. Cooling airflow is responsible for a significant drag fraction on modern cars. Yes, even on EVs! EVs require more cooling than a lot of people think; they are very much not "no cooling air necessary," as some online aerodynamics aficionados seem to think (and we’ll see later on why it might be beneficial to use a large heat exchanger even on an EV). This ZR1 cutaway shows two of its many heat exchangers; unlike most cars, the c...