Investigation on Flow Characteristics of Generic Car Body with Different Boundary Conditions

Abstract

In automotive aerodynamics, it is not common to focus on a specific vehicle due to restricted access to the CAD geometries, their short life span, and limited validation data. For this reason, researchers prefer generic bodies that look like automobiles such as Ahmed Body in their investigations. However, the absence of moving ground and rotating wheels makes these generic bodies unrealistic for aerodynamic studies. In this context, including wheels in CFD simulations, varying ground, and wheel boundary conditions, and comparing their qualitative and quantitative flow parameters with the original Ahmed Body experiment is the main objective of this paper. Results have shown that changing stationary ground and wheel boundaries into moving and rotating boundaries do have minor effects on wake characteristics and drag coefficients. However, just the presence of wheels on the model increases force coefficients significantly (increment in drag and lift coefficients by 27.32% and 188.5 counts, respectively.) even though these boundaries are stationary. As a result, the absence of moving ground and rotating wheels can be tolerated to some extent (especially for experimental studies in which inclusion of moving and rotating boundaries may have difficulties). However, a study cannot be evaluated exactly with a model without wheels.