The automaker opens its first full-scale US wind tunnel in Ohio, and will share its formidable testing capabilities with rivals and other race teams.
It was a windy day in East Liberty, Ohio, the kind of day just right for better understanding the aerodynamic profile of the Acura NSX sports car, Honda CR-V hybrid, or an Indycar Honda could be fine-tuning for a campaign this spring.
It wasn’t just one day but the beginning of what promises to be a steady stream of predictable, highly repeatable, data-rich acoustic and aerodynamic tests to be run on a daily basis by Honda engineers, and potentially by competing automakers or racing teams that would gladly pay $3000 an hour to use this all-new state-of-the-art testing facility.
It sounds like an outrageous expense, but that’s about what Honda has been paying for years to rent wind tunnels for vehicle testing in the U.S. Honda has wind tunnels in Japan but the automaker shockingly did not have its own test facility here for full-size vehicles, even though it will celebrate 40 years of manufacturing cars nearby in Marysville this November.
Honda’s Mike Unger talks about motorsports testing at new wind tunnel, next to Dallara Indycar as prepped for 2019 Indy 500.
Tom Murphy
Honda spent $124 million here in rural central Ohio (an ever-growing base for Honda’s North American manufacturing and product-development operations) to build this greenfield site that routes air one-eighth of a mile in a loop that can reach the inconceivable speed of 310 kilometers per hour, or 193 miles per hour.
For context, hurricane-grade winds begin at 74 mph. Winds of 90 mph can move an average-sized car, so vehicles would need significant bracing in the test chamber if the 6700-hp 5-megawatt electric motor was ever working hard.
Journalists got to tour this massive 110,000-square-foot facility—the main room is the size of a Hollywood sound stage—and walk the path of the airflow, through giant sound-deadening vanes that stretch from floor to ceiling and gently bend the air 90 degrees at four corners to complete a full loop, a bit like a turbocharger.
Giant vanes direct air inside Honda’s new wind tunnel.
Tom Murphy
All the fun begins at the motor, built by General Electric and resembling a jet engine with 12 hollow carbon-fiber blades measuring 27 feet, or 8 meters, from tip to tip. When turned off, an adult can rotate these blades with a bit of muscle.
Every surface throughout this one-eighth mile circuit is carefully designed for smooth airflow, so the concrete chute leading to the motor and fan blades is carefully formed, like a half-pipe at a skateboard park, to funnel in air.
Downwind from the motor, the pumped air is routed through a massive wall of radiators intended to heat or cool it before turning 90 degrees one last time before meeting the nozzle that channels the air directly over whatever vehicle has been parked in the main test chamber.
Technician Elden Shell at the mouth of the 6700-HP blower motor inside Honda wind tunnel.
Tom Murphy
Air can be blown at temperatures ranging from 50° F to 122° F (10° C and 50° C). Those temperatures don’t sound terribly extreme, but anything hotter or colder—with all that wind circulating—could create structural issues for the building, says Mike Unger, lead manager at the new Honda Automotive Laboratories of Ohio (HALO) test cell.
Jacobs Wind Electric Co., based near Minneapolis, designed and built the facility, as it’s been doing since the 1920s as the oldest renewable energy company in the US.
Wind is an untamed force of nature, but in this environment it is highly regulated, controlled and quantified. As wind exits the nozzle (about the size of hangar door for a six-seat private jet) it immediately meets the test car’s front bumper and grille, then the hood and windshield. The metal floor is a turntable, to simulate crosswinds with the car turned sideways. It can rotate 180 degrees.
To illustrate how minutely this facility controls airflow, you can stand directly next to the nozzle in absolute silence and zero breeze, even if the wind is blowing 35 mph. But take one step in front of the nozzle and you’ll be immediately slapped in the face by an invisible assailant—your hair now completely horizontal, sweeping across your face while you struggle to simply stand in place. Now, you’ll hear the wind, because you’ve disrupted it.
Tethered and ready for the wind—and the wand.
Jake Berg
It’s in this scientifically crafted space that a technician—tethered with a harness and cable for safety—will stand near the front of a car in a wind tunnel holding a “smoke wand” as engineers have been doing for decades to understand how every nuance in the sheetmetal, how every slat in a grille, how every protruding door handle, how the rake of the windshield and backlight, and how every rain channel along the roofline will impact airflow, which can translate into excessive wind noise in the cabin and diminished fuel economy.
The dude with the propylene-glycol wand is the only human being in the direct line of this experimental chain, unless a particular test requires an actual person behind the wheel, instead of an Aachen Head bust with super-human listening and sensing capabilities. With automation, it won’t be long before a robotic device stationed in front of the car can move the wand as well as a trained technician.
Mike Unger in white jacket points up at tiny sensor probe anchored by massive 80-ton crane to move it in position.
Tom Murphy
Looking up in the test chamber, the ceiling is about 40 feet high, and your eye is drawn to a long black object that resembles a rectangular submarine. This is an 80-ton crane (or Traverse System in engineering speak) that is 45 feet long and 16 feet tall and it slides on giant rails so a teeny tiny probe—much like an old-school vertical aluminum antenna mounted to a fender—can be positioned anywhere behind, above or beside the vehicle to gather more environmental information for engineers to study.
Tiny sensor probe anchored by 80-ton crane in Honda wind tunnel.
Tom Murphy
For aeroacoustic evaluation, the chamber can be equipped with 502 microphones placed on aluminum frames above and on either side of the vehicle as wind buffets it. Siemens supplies all the technology for the acoustic testing, which becomes even more important in the transition to all-electric vehicles that are inherently quieter.
We haven’t even mentioned yet one of the most expensive and fascinating parts of this wind tunnel: the two dynamometers that can be swapped into the floor, a process that takes four hours. There’s a “wide-belt” dyno that can accommodate an entire vehicle—even a big truck—and the other is called the “five-belt,” which places a belt under each of the four wheels and the fifth under the center of the vehicle, capable of spinning the wheels on this massive treadmill at 155 mph. The five-belt rolling road is designed for production-vehicle development.
Mike Unger explains how rolling testbed (to his right) can be swapped into main test chamber.
Tom Murphy
Each belt module weighs 40 tons, and cranes are used to pick up one to swap with the other. Unger says the wide-belt module (for testing both high-performance sports cars and purpose-built race vehicles up to 193 mph) is the most expensive piece of equipment in the building, and it took three years to design and complete. Its dimensions and specifications dictated much of the building’s overall layout. Brakes and axles are removed from vehicles for most tests to reduce aerodynamic drag.
For now, the HALO wind tunnel is slated to run one shift a day with 16 engineer/technicians monitoring and analyzing reams of data with high-powered computers. Unger has two jobs to fill on the staff. If a second or third shift is added, more staffing will be required.
The building, part of the independent Transportation Research Center, is designed primarily for Honda and Acura vehicle testing, as well as for Honda’s racing teams to validate its latest cars.
But Honda is opening its test chamber doors to other automakers and racing teams, and there are four secure customer bays allowing teams to work without fear of corporate eavesdropping.
During our tour, two racecars were inside one of the bays: a Honda Dallara Indycar and an Acura ARX-04b LMP2 car that Raced at the 24 Hours of Daytona in 2015.
It’s not clear if Honda will charge $3000 per hour, but rest assured the automaker would be happy to let their rivals help pay for this state-of-the-art testbed.
With its extensive capabilities in acoustics and aerodynamics, five-belt and wide-belt dynos, temperature control and the overhead traverse, Unger says Honda’s new wind tunnel is the world’s most advanced. “There are wind tunnels that are faster than us and some that are a little bit quieter than us,” he says. “But in terms of one package where you can do it all, this tunnel is unmatched.”
Acura ARX-04b LMP2 car that raced at the 24 Hours of Daytona in 2015 (left), next to Honda Dallara Indycar.
Tom Murphy
Keyword: Honda's 6700-HP Blast of Fresh Air