Last Saturday, the West Philly Hybrid X Team went to the Boeing Wnd Tunnel to test the aerodynamics of the Factory Five GTM kit car. It was a long day but full of good results and information.
It all started around 6 o 'clock in the morning when Hauger came to get myself, Justin Clarke, and Justin Carter from our house and met up with everybody else at school waiting to to leave. Approximately around 6:35 a.m. we arrived at the Boeing Wind Tunnel. We waited for Mr. Boeing to come and escort us into the building. Once we got in the building, he gave us a tour of everything. It was amazing to see all the computers and machines to run the testing.
We met up with the rest of his crew, and they explained to us on what we were going to do. They wanted us to be as hands-on as possible and we did a lot of work. It was only 7:20 and we were already testing and working on the GTM. We were assigned jobs liker eording data, typing everything we did while moving the GTM, fix camera angles, and run back and forth to get tools.
We changed different things on the car like remodeling the hood of the car and removing other parts that we thought were going to cause our car to preform less then what it was doing already. We did that for the first six hours then we went on our lunch break. After 20 minutes or so, we were back at work again because nobody wanted to sit around and do nothing when we knew we came to get a job done.
In the final hour we had enough time to do two more tests. We knew the more tests we ran, the better our car will be so we pushed ourselves to get a third test in. After the time was done, Mr. Boeing walked us around the rest of the building and showed us what they used to test the aerodynamics on the airplanes and helicopters. By then it was time to leave so we packed up and said our thank yous to everybody for helping us. I think the team learned a lot. We are understanding more what causes drag and what parts are necessary for our car to perform well.
Well that's all for now...
Daniel Moore