bottpower

Anima boys have now completed the bodywork clay model. I think the final resoult is spectacular. We are really happy..  :-D

These photos show the bike, but without showing it completely, just to keep some mystery..

In live View, the bike certainly has a particular aesthetic, which I think is given by its dimensions (I think that it is something that can not be noticed in these photos). It looks small and compact, and at the same time sturdy and powerful.

From a technical point of view, we believe that the aerodynamics of the bike are very good. Forms around the nose are very rounded and the design meets all technical requirements we had set.

The truth is that we are very pleased with the outcome of the fairing design. The more we look at the bike the more we like it. :-)

We would like to congratulate and to thank Joan, Diego, Jaume, Joanma, Cristian and Arnau. In short, the entire team that has worked in this design. You have done a great work!

Anima designers continue working and here we have the third evolution of the design. We have defined the tail and the nose of the bike.

From now on it is necessary to work in 3D. Here you have some proposals for the nose of the bike.

And here several proposals for the tail.

As always you will find the images in bigger size in our Flickr gallery.

The bodywork is beeing designed by Anima, a design studio from Barcelona.

You can see their first 5 proposals in our Flickr gallery (sketches A, B, C, D, E).

Here we have the second evolution of the design, these ones have a more racing feeling. Compared with the previous ones, air exits are smaller and surfaces are smoother.

The designs we are working on follow current design trend, more worried about turns than top speed in straight line.

Our intention is to create a design as effective as possible and later on try to make it look nice. But efficiency is our first goal. When I talk about efficiency I don’t mean top speed, I mean try to reduce lap times.

Please let me know your opinion about these designs.

This is proposal A1:

Proposal A2:

Proposal B1:

Proposal B2:

Proposal C:

As always, you can see the sketches with bigger size in our Flickr gallery.

Last weekend I continued drawing components from the Kawasaki ZX6. In this case the water pump, the injection body and the airbox.

Of course we must design a new airbox, but I thought it was interesting to draw the ZX6 one in order to have a reference. Regarding this airbox, it catches my attention that the box has a quite small size, and the intake conduit a big cross section.

To design an airbox is not a simple issue. Pressure waves produced by the intake valves travel through it, and it is necessary to dimmension the box volume and the intake conduit (length and cross section) in such a way that the frequency of the pressure waves going through the airbox matches the opening frequency of the intake valves at certain rpm (normally top power rpm).
Also it is necessary to achieve a design that maximizes pressurization at high speed, in this way it is interesting that the air intake is located at a high pressure area in the bodywork, ideally in the nose like for example the KTM 250 GP or de Ducati MotoGP.

It is also necessary to try to achieve an air flow as much laminar as possible inside the intake conduit. Theorically the cross section of this conduit should increase as it arrives to the box, in order to reduce the air speed and increase it’s pressure.

I would like to find a collaborator with experience in CFD (Computer Fluid Dynamics) to study these questions, and analyze several virtual solutions before deciding the final design. So if you know about CFD and want to collaborate in this project, please send me an email..  :)

Continuing with the airbox design, other points to take into consideration are the box stiffness, that must be stiff enough to avoid beeing deformed by the pressure waves. Also it is important to make the box and it’s cover watertight, in order to avoid pressure losses.
There are also other issues that add extra complexity, for example the airbox must house the secondary injectors. In the ZX6 airbox they are located on the box cover.
Finally, the intake conduit design determines heavily the chassis design, but this is a subject for another post.
Like always you will find higher resolution images in the Flickr gallery.

Last weekend I watched two motogp related movies/documentaries that were released some time ago, I’m talking about “Faster” and “The Doctor, the Tornado and the Kentucky Kid“. I’m not going to make a review of them, because there are already a lot on internet, I just will mention that I found them really good, I think that any motogp enthusiast will love these movies, it’s worth to watch it.
The reason I’m writing this post is that I found something that I didn’t know, and that captured my attention: the most radical aerodynamic concept that I have seen in the modern World Championship era.

During 2002 season, the new 990 4 strokes coexisted with the almost wiped out 500 cc. 2 strokes. The new 990’s had more power and higher top speed. Peter Clifford’s team, Red Bull Yamaha, tried to reduce the top speed difference improving the aerodynamics of their bikes. In March of 2002, they planned a secret test in Valencia (Spain), because they wanted to test a new bodywork.

The rider who tested it was a very young John Hopkins (in 2002 he made his debut in MotoGP, he was only 19 years old), because his team mate, Gary Mckoy was injuried. The test finished when Hopkins had a crash, but the team members said that it was not related with the bodywork they were testing.
Although wind tunnel tests were possitive, the team ruled out the new bodywork, because as they mention in the movie, in the test they didn’t achieve any significant improvement.

Tags: aerodynamics, bodywork, motogp, peter clifford, testing