Cooling engines and now batteries is a crucial element of car design – although sometimes what you see is an identity-providing illusion...
The motor car is a complex device that burns stuff to produce energy that then moves it along the road. It could originally burn coal, then petrol or diesel as liquid fuels. With the electric car it often means burning stuff at a distance , the hope being that eventually all electrical energy will come from wind, solar or, more contentiously, nuclear sources.
Because of the basic inefficiency of all these methods of having a transportable energy storage system, waste heat is a problem. There used to be a car park at the top of Wrotham Hill on the way from London to Kent where cars could ‘let off steam’ after climbing the 130-metre-high hill. Until I bought an earlyThe front-end view of an early Edwardian car was dominated by the heat exchanger, possibly wrongly called the radiator.
By the late 1930s and early 1940s, when all-enveloping monocoque body designs replaced cars with classic exposed radiator shells, many manufacturers struggled to retain their recognisable upright designs. Without the large exposed surface area of the traditional radiator, cooling air had to be encouraged to reach the radiator core to control overheating.
Simply put, the only air available to the engineers and designers of an automobile is within the frontal area of the car. If you want more, you have to reach up and grab it with a duct or above-surface mounted intake. The dramaticCountach concept was clearly styled with little thought for cooling air, the arrival of big square boxes above the rear wheels told you that something needed fixing.
Higher top speeds, lower drag, and brakes hidden within the wheels of performance cars meant that some kind of brake-cooling ducts were needed, particularly on racing sports cars. These ducts became an indicator of sporting potential, but in recent years fake ducts have appeared on everything from SUVs to city cars.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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