Being the geek that I am, I sometimes like to sit down and watch Discovery Channel’s “How Stuff’s Made”. Last week, the program was on tortilla chips, combat knives and mattresses. Anyhow, this blog post will be like that, but CUER themed, and the “Stuff” in question is the canopy.

Aerodynamics is not a precise science. If it were, then all F1 cars would look and perform the same (given the same engine etc), and there would be no need for the teams to spend millions of pounds on wind tunnel testing and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and Adrian Newey would be out of a job. However, it isn’t, and that makes designing an aerodynamic piece of bodywork somewhat of an art form, where the intuition of the designer can make a great deal of difference. Just like a good artist knows how to paint a house to make it look, well, like a house, so a good designer knows how to draw a form that is aerodynamic.

So, when CUER recognised through our own wind tunnel tests that the 2009 canopy wasn’t very good (it was shedding two big vortices), a fourth year project student turned solar car designer sat…
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