Give your car a bubble bath to make it fuel efficient. Seriously? Well, this time we are joking. But soap bubbles do boost up the mileage of a car. Read further to know how and why.
A team of engineers at the automotive research consultants Mira in Nuneaton, UK, are in the process of making a system that utilises soap bubbles filled with helium to improve the fuel efficiency of cars in future.
The team made use of twelve cameras to track the 3-millimetre bubbles swirling around the car in a wind tunnel, thus capturing the flow of air in a remarkable detail.
The helium in the soap bubbles imparts a neutral buoyancy-left to the bubbles and as a result of it these bubbles will neither rise nor fall in the air. Besides, any up or down movement can be attributed to air flow around the car. At present there is no tool that can give such insight into what’s going on in the fluid around a car.
Today’s potential car customers have started to consider economy and carbon emissions when selecting a new car. This is a major reason behind lying of emphasis on aerodynamics these days by car makers.
Therefore, cutting a car’s air resistance is an easier and cheaper method of decreasing the air drag and a much better way than reworking on an entire engine or drivetrain. Hence the soap bubble technique is a cheaper and better way of looking at the car aerodymanics.
This technique has long been used to see how air moves around a structure without much success. With the new camera system, an unprecedented detail has been revealed as the camera can capture the precise movement of individual bubbles in 3D for later analysis and exploration.
There are sensors that can determine how the car interacts with the air rushing past. The bubble-tracking approach captures the speed as well as the direction of air flow, which makes it more useful than existing tracking techniques such as injecting smoke trails around the car.
The team is considering on building a machine which will be able to produce larger bubbles and this will make easier for the camera to capture all the movements of the bubbles.
