What are the responsibilities and job description for the Wind Tunnel Test Engineer - NASCAR position at Penske Racing South?
Working with Team Penske's aero group, the candidate will play a key role in the design and performance development process by managing all aspects of full scale wind tunnel testing. This testing serves as the primary resource for defining the body specification and ensuring competitive aerodynamic performance.
Primary Responsibilities
- Assist with generating run lists for wind tunnel testing
- Coordinate with R & D Fabrication for test preparation
- Review run lists with fabricators prior to testing, and explain concept intent
- Provide approval for prototypes (ensure test items meet intent)
- Oversee car setup
- Conduct full scale wind tunnel tests
- Oversee run list execution
- Review results, and adapt run plan as needed
- Provide results summary upon test completion
- General Analysis and Documentation
- Provide post-test reports
- Analyze the wind tunnel, vehicle movement, and resulting data to understand aerodynamic phenomena, assess system performance, and recommend optimizations to improve tunnel / vehicle performance, reliability, and test efficiency
- Document testing procedures for reference and to ensure traceability along with repeatability
Secondary Responsibilities
- Define wind tunnel testing programs and practices (methods development)
- Documentation of body specification intent, and construction techniques
- Correlation studies across wind tunnels, and CFD
- Identifying and exploiting areas of potential performance gains
Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related field.
- Strong understanding of aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics, and wind tunnel testing methodology.
- Experience with full-scale or model-scale wind tunnel testing, instrumentation, and data acquisition systems.
- Proficiency with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools for correlation and validation.
- Familiarity with CAD software (CATIA, NX, or SolidWorks) and data analysis tools (MATLAB, Python, Excel).