It’s been a long time coming for Honda’s engineers and designers, but the company officially opened its new $124 million state-of-the-art wind tunnel today in East Liberty, Ohio, near its product development center.
The new facility gives the company the ability to test its Honda and Acura products, as well as the automaker’s race vehicles under one roof for the first time in the United States.
The new facility, dubbed Honda Automotive Labs of Ohio, or HALO, will support product development by allowing Honda engineers to do advance research locally, as well as allow for cross-functional collaboration during testing. The wind tunnel will also provide a new resource for academic and aerodynamic researchers in America, as Honda plans to open up the facility for others, although not initially.
Spending money to save money
In the long run, HALO should save the company money by shortening new vehicle development time.
“We were spending a lot of time traveling and spending money on other facilities and renting them,” said Chris Coombs, Wind Tunnel Business Strategy Lead for the Automotive Development Center at Honda Development and Manufacturing of America, at a special advanced look at the new facility provided to TheDetroitBureau.com.
Initial discussions about the feasibility of HALO started in 2015, with Honda breaking ground in 2017.
At the time, vehicles developed by Honda of America had to be tested in wind tunnels around the world. The automaker has three wind tunnels in Japan, but they’re usually booked. This meant vehicles and personnel would have to be sent to Europe or elsewhere to complete wind tunnel testing, a grossly inefficient working procedure.
“If you’ve got a car on a boat or a plane that’s not being tested, that’s an expensive piece of equipment that’s not being used,” said Mike Unger, wind tunnel lead at the Automotive Development Center.
With the opening of HALO, Honda won’t have to spend the money on shipping prototypes and vehicle engineers across the country or around the world, which should shorten development times and make the company more efficient.
“It’ll cut down on the number of prototype cars we have to make, because we’d have to make a couple extra cars to account for a lot of time spent on boats or airplanes shipping them all around the world.”
But the new tunnel also allows for quicker testing should a problem arise during vehicle development.
“You can imagine if we suddenly had an aerodynamic problem and we need to go to wind tunnel. Like you can’t just call somebody up and say, ‘hey, what are you doing tomorrow?’ Like you got to fly a car, ship a car somewhere and the airplane tickets and it’s weeks of planning.”
Even now, as HALO opens, the automaker is testing vehicles is rented facilities around the world, a practice that will be significantly reduced now that it’s operational.
“So that was one of the core reasons that kind of got us thinking about the needs for North America. It just wasn’t sustainable the amount of travel that must be conducted,” Coombs said.
“You have the aerodynamics, air acoustics, the racing all in one facility, those different divisions tested in different facilities around the country. So now to have them all in one place working together is a huge advantage for us,” he noted later.
HALO was designed through a collaboration of different groups within the company in North America and Japan, as part of a multi-year collaborative effort
HALO is designed for a variety of testing
Honda’s new wind tunnel allows for different types of testing, one that uses what is basically a giant vehicle treadmill. The system consists of two different belt systems: a single rolling belt system that rolls under the entire vehicle, as well as one that uses five separate rolling belts, one under each tire, as well as one in the center of the vehicle. The two system modules can be switched depending on the test required thanks to a unique interchangeable modular system that can be changed in about four hours.
The different belts are used for different vehicles.
The single belt system is used for sports cars and race car testing at wind speeds of much as 190 mph. In contrast, the five-belt system is used when developing production vehicles.
The tunnel also allows for air acoustics testing of vehicle design, an important capability as Honda electrifies its vehicles. Typically, an internal combustion engine’s cacophony masks a myriad of other components’ noise. With electric motors, there is no such noise, so it’s necessary to eliminate or reduce the noise from other components. This is in additional to the noise that engineers also try to quell, such as wind and road noise.
To track it all, Honda uses 502 external directional microphones and cameras and 54 internal microphones inside the vehicle’s cabin.
Honda’s biggest fan
The crucial element of HALO is its fan, which is sourced from General Electric. With a diameter of 26.25 feet, or 8 meters, it’s comprised of 12 hollow carbon fiber blades set at a fixed angle. A 5-megawatt, 6,700 horsepower electric motor spins the fan at 250 rpm, producing a max air speed of 192.6 mph, or 310 kph.
An added benefit
Locating different types of teams under one roof will help Honda develop new cutting-edge ideas. “Previously, we had aero-acoustic guys testing in one wind tunnel elsewhere in the world, the aerodynamic guys were testing in a different tunnel and the engineers were testing in another place. All of those people are trying to do roughly the same thing, but they’ve never got together to share ideas,” Unger said.
So, Honda might test a Civic on Monday and Tuesday, followed by an acoustic test on a Pilot on Wednesday, before wrapping up the week doing IndyCar tests. The company plans on production cars accounting for 80% of the testing, with the remainder going to race programs.
“We’ll have the opportunity for all of these engineers that are doing the same kinds of work to share ideas. So, in that rubbing elbows with cohorts, we’ll develop new cutting-edge ideas and new ways to measure things.”
Open to others
Once Honda’s own tests and scheduling have been set, the automaker plans to open HALO to third party customers. The facility is designed with four secured confidential customer bays that are separate from the main part of the floorplan. Using third-party employees to operate the tunnel to ensure project confidentiality.
With the opening of HALO, Honda will have invested $14 billion in Ohio since first locating in the state more than 40 years ago.