Wind Tunnel Another World First for Italy’s Pininfarina

TURIN – Pininfarina SpA is preparing to celebrate 25 years of “racing ahead” in the unique art of aerodynamic (and aero-acoustic) research with a new “world’s first” wind tunnel.

The Italian design house’s new Ground Effect Simulation System, which cost €4 million ($5.1 million) and took two years to design, takes ground-effects simulation another step closer to the real world.

Pininfarina considers the new test center a major leap from the one it built in 1995, which at the time was the first capable of testing full-scale cars by simulating the aerodynamic effects due to wheel rotation and ground-relative motion.

The new system banks on the experience gained in more than 10 years of testing. It mainly is intended to improve aerodynamic research on full-scale racecars, providing Pininfarina with a major technical advantage over its competitors.

The new T-Belt system, as it is called, comes with the overall width of the upstream end of the moving ground of 8.2 ft. (2.5 m) rather than 3.3 ft. (1 m), for a length of 4.9 ft. (1.5 m), as the result of the combination of three belts installed side by side. The central belt is 22 ft. (6.7 m) long and exceeds the length of any car for which it is relevant to measure aerodynamic efficiency.

New tunnel’s T-Belt layout.

This layout is said to offer excellent simulation of the ground effects under the car’s front end, for both passenger cars and racecars, and represents a major improvement compared with the single narrow belt setup of other wind tunnels.

The result is a wind tunnel believed to be the only one worldwide that offers the opportunity to measure and analyze aerodynamic flows of a full-scale car in every situation, simulating air turbulence originating from the ground and other sources, such as side wind or the breeze produced by the passing of a large truck.

The equipment can simulate the conditions of a car driving at speeds as high as 155 mph (250 km/h).