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Drag is a force that acts parallel to and in the same direction as the airflow. The drag coefficient of an automobile measures the way the automobile passes through the surrounding air. When automobile companies design a new vehicle they take into consideration the automobile drag coefficient in addition to the other performance characteristics ...
Drag coefficients in fluids with Reynolds number approximately 10 4 [1] [2] Shapes are depicted with the same projected frontal area. In fluid dynamics, the drag coefficient (commonly denoted as: , or ) is a dimensionless quantity that is used to quantify the drag or resistance of an object in a fluid environment, such as air or water.
is the drag coefficient – a dimensionless coefficient related to the object's geometry and taking into account both skin friction and form drag. If the fluid is a liquid, c d {\displaystyle c_{\rm {d}}} depends on the Reynolds number ; if the fluid is a gas, c d {\displaystyle c_{\rm {d}}} depends on both the Reynolds number and the Mach number .
In mechanics and aerodynamics, the drag area of an object represents the effective size of the object as it is "seen" by the fluid flow around it. The drag area is usually expressed as a product , where is a representative area of the object, and is the drag coefficient, which represents what shape it has and how streamlined it is.
For an object with well-defined fixed separation points, like a circular disk with its plane normal to the flow direction, the drag coefficient is constant for Re > 3,500. [17] The further the drag coefficient C d is, in general, a function of the orientation of the flow with respect to the object (apart from symmetrical objects like a sphere).
The drag coefficient is used to compare the solutions of different geometries by means of a dimensionless number. A drag count is more user-friendly than the drag coefficient, as the latter is usually much less than 1. A drag count of 200 to 400 is typical for an airplane at cruise. [4]
Most production sports cars and high efficiency vehicles come standard with many of these deletions in order to be competitive in the automotive and race market, while others choose to keep these drag-increasing aspects of the vehicle for their visual aspects, or to fit the typical uses of their customer base.
Today's hybrids are just now catching up to the best cars from 70-80 years ago in drag coefficient, and cutting aero drag is reponsibile for about 70% of their fuel economy improvement over typical gas cars. Slightly reduced weight and a hybrid powertrain along with use of CVT and smaller engine is the rest. This is embarassing.