A brilliant technical post has been theorized on another site and I thought it too interesting to not be brought up here. Everyone recalls Mercedes' DDRS system last year and its use of two pipes traversing the length of the car to the front wing. Those two pipes run next to the engine and exhaust and the flow was of course heated 'X' amount. Mercedes could still use those two pipes and combine them with their last year kers cooling inlets (which are are sidepod intake.) Then have a look at Rayleigh flow on wikipedia and they find that they can add a good amount of energy to the flow entering those inlets if they manage to make it flow in a small channel adjacent to the hot exhaust pipes (which it is with those pipes). To put this high energy to good use, they exit the newly found energy at the diffuser area blowing the starter motor hole dip in the floor many are scratching their heads about. Note the heat sensing sticker on the crash structure just behind the drive shaft cover and we can also barely see one at the 'dip' area below. Now why on earth would they need heat stickers there? They know exactly how hot the engine and coolant is running already and exhaust gas isn't finding its way that inboard. The only comment I have made on this to date is if such low mach figures would be of any benefit for this. But what's interesting here is the new KERS cooling intakes are positioned in such a way that such an idea could work. Image Unavailable, Please Login
Certainly an interesting theory. However, as you noted, my "gut feel" (FWIW!)..... I don't think any velocity increase would be significant at the kind of speeds we're talking about. Looking at the Wiki article suggests you've gotta be around Mach 0.75 and up before the effect gets "serious". Further, given there's no free lunch I suspect it would also reduce the Coanda effect which it seems remains the holy grail right now. Also seems pretty complicated to implement; But OTOH, so was their previous attempt. Cheers, Ian
