Engineering


Scorpio intro	Styling	Design & engineering	Manufacturing	Marketing	Service & maintenance	About my Scorpio
1988, 1989	1995	Variants	(Future)	(Future)	(Future)	(Future)
Specs	'88 Survey	Design	Engineering	Testing	(Future)	(Future)

In 1984 the German design engineering team acquired its own wind tunnel in the Merkenich Design Center for testing full-scale clay models and metal prototypes at velocities of up to 186 mph in temperatures ranging from -40 to +50 degrees C and humidities from 5 to 95%.

In this beautiful cutaway drawing from Ford AG's descriptive booklet on the Koln-Merkenich facility, you can see the details of the wind tunnel. Notice that it's essentially a closed, rectangular doughnut completely enclosing the moving air. The enormous turbine (the blue vaned "torpedo" in the upper left) draws air across the test region (the little red car) and then circulates it clockwise through a parallel plenum to cycle it repeatedly through the chamber. Scorpio in wind tunnel

Of course, if instead it had simply sucked air in through one end of the building and exhausted it through the other end, the designers might have drawn in enough bugs to learn why they skoosh themselves so semi-permanently on my hood. (The bugs, not the designers....)

Notice also in the large drawing the inwardly contoured ceiling that reduces the chamber's cross-section just upwind of the test region; this creates a Venturi effect that accelerates the airflow across the car.

Designer at CAD terminal Finally, notice that the car sits on a robotic platform that enables the engineers to position it at any attitude with respect to the wind.

And I think it's marvelous that - with all of this technology - some junior engineer still has to stand inside the chamber and blow smoke through a wand to make the slipstream visible. I wonder whom he had to offend to get that assignment. Perhaps he's the fellow who lost the World Cup for Germany?

Return to the top of this page.