PROBLEM:
In 1997, the British set a new land speed record of 763 mph – a.k.a. Mach 1.02 – just over the speed of sound. Later that same year, Ed Shadle & Keith Zanghi formed North American Eagle™ for a single purpose: bring the world record back to North America.
This venture is unique because it’s the first land speed project to use a car converted from a former jet fighter fuselage – an F-104 Starfighter (minus the wings, of course). This vehicle is powered by the same 52,000-horsepower engine that the warplane used to fly Mach 2.2.
But transforming an aerospace icon like the Starfighter – which was designed by a legendary engineer, used to develop the space program, and flown by the most daring pilots of all time – into the world’s fastest car requires digital, action-ready data that the North American Eagle Team couldn’t get from traditional methods.
SOLUTION:
Compatible with Verisurf, Dassault Systemes and dozens of other software packages, the FARO Laser Tracker and FaroArm empower the Team to digitize the entire, 56-foot-long vehicle. They send the collected data to their Aerodynamic Engineer who designs any necessary modifications in CATIA. The completed design is then sent to CSM Software to perform computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis.
Once the design has been verified, Wind Tunnel model makers use the digital dataset to make modifications. When complete, the models are sent back to the wind tunnel where the design undergoes high-speed testing. How fast is “high-speed”? Mach 1.1.
Following these tests, the dataset is sent back to the model maker who then builds a part to be used on the actual vehicle.
ROI:
In years past, this process would have required full-size plaster models and thousands of man hours to create. Using the FARO Laser Tracker and FaroArm, the process took a mere two hours! It takes less than two hours to go from data acquisition to completed assemblies.
“It is truly remarkable what FARO has done for our project,” Keith Zanghi, Director of Operations, said “What would have taken years to create in the past now takes only a few weeks. I’ve been in the aerospace industry for 20 years, and we’ve gone from the caveman days of plaster models to the 21st century using FARO Technologies.”
