aravilare wrote:
codygo wrote:
aravilare wrote:
Why eyeball aero when you can go meta and eyeball implied aero expertise from helmets and then infer aero from that.
I have a lot of academic and professional experience as an aerodynamicist, including theory, computation, and wind tunnel testing, so yes I’d say I’m very accurate in assessing aerodynamic designs. I like Slowtwitch because of the shared knowledge from several enthusiastic experts, so I try to contribute in kind. You don’t have to believe me, but at least be a positive contributor to the forum.
So, in your professional opinion as an aerodynamicist, we should just rely on your eyeballs to assess aerodynamics instead of actual testing, especially for equipment that is supposedly highly individualized in performance.
Nobody said to avoid testing, but will you test every option under the sun? Aerodynamics is expensive for many reasons, among them the immense design space. Given finite time and testing resources, an expert will extract far more value and be far less surprised by any computational or experimental study. Yes, I can tell right away from surface characteristics if there has been proper aerodynamic refinement, which allows me to test maybe a handful of design options and outperform someone trying to use “DOE” software. Theory, or “eyeballs,” as you say, is what I get paid to do.
Part of why I commented here is to say the notion of “highly individualized” isn’t really that much of an elusive mystery if you consider rider states more carefully than it is commonly discussed, e.g. head and torso attitude as I have. It will continue to remain a mystery because most people test for force numbers as if the test were on a black box, and don’t try to get any flowfield data (qualitative or quantitative) to guide refinement or what to test next.
