Formula one car body and wings temperature at high speed

[Hamza1988]

Hi everyone!! I was wondering during a formula one race, does the temperature of the formula one car skin (body and wings) increase due to its moving at high speed??

 

[SwinnyGG]

The short answer is no.

 

[Hamza1988]

What about the front wing and the rear wing where the pressure on the top of the wing increases due to its profile as air passes over it at high speed. Shouldn't the increase in pressure cause the air temperature to increase which eventually should increase the temperature of the wing?

 

[SwinnyGG]

No. Compared to the general field of aerodynamic study, race cars are very slow, stream velocities are low, and the amount of time that a given surface produces lift is very short.

 

[mlevett3]

Aerodynamic heating isn't a concern until much, much faster speeds. I used to study ultra high speed flight vehicles and I don't know if anybody thinks about aerothermodynamics til the hypersonic regime.

 

[humbertoengineer]

I think the heating cause by the aerodynamics are not important while the flow is considered to be incompressible, at race cars speeds we still consider the flow to be incompressible, because the mach number is under 0.3 or 0.4 depending on the literature, if you consider the total temperature to be 77F or 25C and the speed of the car 217 miles/h or 350 km/h, the mach number will be 0.28 so the flow is still consider incompressible, this means the density is consider to be constant so the compression heat will be negligible just as the heat created by friction.

 

[dcheck]

In my mind,the speed is still so slower that the outside or the surface could accumulate the heat.