Wind Tunnel Race Car Models and Custom Prototype Devices Design

| Created: February 4, 2019 | Updated: March 16, 2020

Have you never been asked to increase work efficiency when designing electronic prototypes? How did you handle your PCB design merging reliability, mechanical integration and short delivery time?

During the design and preparation processes, time is a key factor. It is quite common to receive special requests at the last moment. In order to be able to deliver electronic devices in time the design process, validation, prototyping and testing have to be as quick as possible.

In our experience, we introduced Altium Designer in 2011 to our Wind Tunnel department as an electronic devices design tool.

This choice was a winning one allowing us to react and create new custom devices in a very efficient and quick way.

Starting from what it is needed in a Wind Tunnel in terms of acquisition systems and electronic devices, we will present some practical applications related to specific needs. We will describe how we have approached and managed the requests using Altium Designer.

One other topic is the integration of the mechanical enclosures and the PCB boards designed. Using the 3D Altium Designer CAD tool, we have been able to efficiently integrate the new devices inside the model even with a significant lack of space.

Last but not least, we would like to highlight how important it is to create proper documentation and how much Altium Designer has helped to improve our design efficiency, productivity and output.

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About Author

Since I was young an amazing attraction and interest for electronics and software drove me to an Electronics Degree. After my studies and a collaboration with a University medical neurophysiology research team (BRAIN), I moved to a Telecommunication Company, offering services, consultancy and software development.

At the end of 2003 I was involved in an ambitious project. My experience and competencies were requested to support a company working in the motorsport field in order to build and manage a new wind tunnel designed for race cars located in S. Agata Bolognese (BO) Italy. The company was Aerolab and the main investors was Fondtech and Dallara. This Wind Tunnel was built, tested and calibrated in less than eight months. I had the responsibility to drive all the wind tunnel operations activities, developments, maintenances and customer support. I covered this position as Wind Tunnel Manager until 2009. During this time, I cultivated a lot of experience in wind tunnel management, acquisition systems, aerodynamics and automation. A mixture of several field of engineering were forcing me to develop clever and reliable high performance solutions.

After this, I embarked in another challenging project: designing a full electric race car that had similar performances as an F3 race car. Thanks to these wonderful experiences, in 2011, I moved to Toyota Motorsport GmbH in Cologne, Germany. Here I am in charge as Wind Tunnel Principal Engineer. With 15 years of experiences in Wind Tunnel and Aerodynamics I had the pleasure to provide applications support to several Customer Racing Teams competing in different series: F1, DTM, IRL, LMP1 (Le Mans) …

In the meantime I have never stopped to keep myself up to date. I continued to develop software and hardware related to different wind tunnel fields. I am as excited about learning now as I was when I was young, this is the fuel for winning team.