Amateur Aerodynamics

A "heat exchanger" is, as the name suggests, a device for transferring energy from one working fluid to another. Here, we want to transfer internal energy from the liquid coolant to air; this transfer process is called "heat." If we input enough heat, we can use the increased energy of the air to generate thrust; this is basically what jet engines do. However, we're constrained in designing or modifying a road car by low mass flow. While a car cooling system can ingest a few pounds of air each second, a GEnx-2B67 engine on the 747-8, for example, swallows more than one ton per second at takeoff (that's per engine —747s have to move a lot of air to get off the ground!). Additionally, small temperature differences and tight engine packaging will make it difficult to get thrust/negative drag overall—even in the best case, the theoretical maximum thrust is very, very small. A better goal is simply to minimize drag from the cooling system, which we'll look a...

"Diffuser" is one of those terms that lots of car modifiers use but very few understand. In popular car culture, diffusers are rear bumper garnishes, grills, or add-ons that somehow magically create downforce, and you will find lots of these faux diffusers available for purchase at online retailers.   You might be surprised to learn that nearly every car manufactured in the last 20 years has at least one actual diffuser on it (most have open rear diffusers now too—"open" because they lack sides and thus are not true diffusers. The ground forms one wall of these diffusers while the opposite wall is a plastic panel under the trunk or, quite often, the muffler). The incorporation of this real diffuser into basic car design has had important effects in improving cooling system capacity and reducing cooling drag in modern cars. It isn't there for downforce, yo ; it isn't just for race cars; and it isn't found at the rear of the car. The most important diff...