A Comparison Between Experimental Life Road Simulation and Computational Fluid Dynamics and Fluid Structure Interaction for Sedan Car

Abstract

The flow around road vehicle is characterized by regions of separation that affect the aerodynamics and performance of the vehicle due to the variations in the negative pressure zones. In this work, Computational fluid dynamics and Fluid-structure interaction models are developed to simulate the aerodynamic performance of a sedan car. An experimental live road simulation is conducted to validate the performance and the accuracy of the presented models. The experimental setup was organized on a sedan car using tufts and digital cameras for flow visualization. Four cruise speeds of 40, 60, 80, and 100 km/hr are used. At low cruise speed the FSI simulation can attain the required result for indicating the negative pressure zones, created behind the car tail and mostly close to the car body. The experimental results appear to visualize the movement of the tufts that attained a certain angle corresponding to the flow speed, which matches the distribution of negative pressure and wake area. At high cruise speed the CFD simulation elucidated the separation area where the negative pressure created behind the car tail matched the movement of the tufts which attained an approximate straight angle corresponding to the flow speed having a swirling movement.

One-Way Fluid Structure Interaction of a Utility Vehicle Splitter using CFD Modelling

“…Computational simulation has been used in small vehicles, to enhance the design of the chassis in a Go-Kart [8] and in large vehicles, such as modelling the aerodynamic response for a large bus when overtaking, taking into account the interference of crosswind [9]. CFD analysis can also be presented as one-way fluid structure interaction (FSI), as shown in [5], for spoiler optimization or to model a sedan car operating at different cruise speeds [10]. Also, the one-way FSI model was used to investigate the aerodynamic shape for the Shell Eco-marathon (SEM) vehicle [11].…”