The ambition of the project is to develop new aerodynamic design paradigms that meet the objectives of sustainable mobility of the twenty-first century, allowing in particular to increase the aerodynamic performance of urban vehicles with low carbon impact (cars, scooters, electric bikes, drones).
The project is based on a Geneva invention from our laboratory, a pixelated wind tunnel to generate arbitrary wind conditions, ranging from turbulence to gusts, rain, hail, snow, dust and all other bad weather conditions. The wind tunnel itself was introduced to the world in 2017 as a wind tunnel for the development and certification of drones.
The AEROPAC project has validated pixelated wind technology for a number of applications, and in particular sustainable mobility, whether road, sea or air.
This project gave birth, in September 2018, to a drone with elaborate aerodynamic shapes, with an autonomy of 90 minutes (eBeeX of the Swiss company senseFly). On 22nd June 2022, it became the world's first drone in its category to be certified by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). The improvement of the eBeeX in a pixelated wind tunnel as part of the AEROPAC project gave a lot of credibility to the aerodynamic processes developed within the project.
The AEROPAC project has demonstrated that the techniques developed during the project are enabling and make it possible to offer solutions to needs that could not be met until then.
In particular, portability of pixelated wind tunnels (such as a mobile phone) have made it possible to satisfy totally unexpected needs, an example of which is that of the first drone on the planet Mars. NASA was able to test the first drone to fly on Mars (Ingenuity, April 19, 2021) using the pixelated wind tunnel technology. Such a wind tunnel could be introduced into the test chamber of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a chamber with Martian atmospheric conditions (1% Earth's atmospheric pressure, carbon dioxide). There is no wind tunnel in the world operating under these conditions. The drone is on its 29th successful flight (as of summer 2022).
AEROPAC's pixelated wind tunnel technology is now exported worldwide. The Geneva-based company, WindShape, which graciously supplied the wind tunnel to the AEROPAC project, was selected from among 619 candidates to set up in New York State, in order to promote the development of test and certification centers for air mobility vehicles around the world.
The AEROPAC project has had two positive effects for the development of value-added activities. As an example, the French company MICHELIN took an interest in the AEROPAC project for tests on a new paradigm of sustainable maritime mobility: embellishing existing cargo ships with inflatable sails (WISAMO project, patented technology in Switzerland). In 2021, tests were conducted on models of inflatable wings.
In addition, the AEROPAC project has made it possible to imagine absolutely radical aerodynamic testing technologies for road vehicles. An example concerns the cornering tests of competition cars (Formula 1), imagined by the project manager on the Swiss side. In a corner, a vehicle feels an apparent wind faster outside than inside the corner. For several decades, F1 teams have been trying to develop test benches to reproduce this kind of situation on the road. Pixelated wind tunnels provide the solution to this need. These digital wind tunnels can actually generate a speed gradient present in corners. The world's first prototype test bench for experimental measurements of cornering vehicles (F1) has just been designed in the laboratory of the Swiss leader.
Project partner(s)
Project leader - team
Flavio Noca
(HEPIA)