Airflow Conditioning with Honeycomb Mesh

So that stuff is interesting to me. Like all the we're going to get in all the like boundary layers and you know those kinds of things. That's kind of stuff that I want to learn about and how you measure it, I guess. Sure. Well, we could start off. We could just walk around here and talk about the uh the contraction. It it looks very uh solid until you're actually looking into it. It's really just very thick metal honeycomb. And of course, the honeycomb is here to straighten up the air as it's turning this corner and making a 180° turn. Uh it's coming into here. And we want all the air to be very uniform. If you look at the shape, it's got kind of a hemispherical design to it. And that is because each one of these planes of honeycomb are pointed at where the front of the car would be. Think of it like a lens that is focusing the light. In this case, you can think of this as kind of a aerodynamic lens. It's focusing the air to get it all to come in at the right angles. This is kind of like the stuff that you find in intake tubes of cars in front of the mass air flow sensor. Yes. Yes. For the same reason. Yes. You want to straighten out the air and make it as uniform as you can. In our case, you know, a vector has length and direction. So, every particle of air is a vector. So, if you looked at this thing as a field, you'd want every molecule of air to be coming in at the right angle and at the right speed. And this uh honeycomb controls the angle. Um the fact that we've got the 4:1 contraction ratio that helps unify the speed as it's accelerating coming downstream from the face of this to the uh test area. Now since it's a 4:1 contraction, the air flow here is running at around 35 m an hour. So you could stand in front of it and you'd feel a pretty good suction, but it's not uncontrolled. And then as soon as you get into there, obviously it speeds up. The last thing I want to mention is you've heard several times now about 130 mph. You say, "Well, gee, these cars are capable of running over 200, but you have to be very careful. Sure, we can build a wind tunnel and other people have built wind tunnels