Numerical Analysis of Wind-Break Fences for Truck Stability in Crosswind

Heavy-Vehicle Response to Crosswind: Evaluation of Driver Reactions Using a Dynamic Driving Simulator

“…For sake of completeness, it is reported in Figure 8 a comparison between the lateral aerodynamic force F y evaluated using the exposed area approach above described and a CFD case involving the same lorry used in this work running at 90 km/h with a 25 m/s crosswind at the tunnel exit. The simulated CFD case was taken by the previous work of Semeraro et al [21]. As can be seen, there is a good agreement between the two methods.…”

“…Among these conditions, high-intensity crosswinds could be listed as one of the most common causes that lead to lane invasion (with the potential of incurring a multi-vehicle accident) and, in the worst cases, to vehicle rollover. This is the reason why a lot of research effort has been made in recent years to investigate this phenomenon by authors like Coleman and Baker [1], Baker et al [2], Cai and Chen [3] and many others [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] considering also different vehicles typologies.…”

“…This situation arises in particular due to infrastructure elements that may shield the vehicle in some sections of the road. For example, in the case of tunnels [21], bridge towers [5][6][7][8]13,16] or for peculiar topographies of the landscape where the vehicle is moving. The aim of these studies is to investigate this phenomenon to gain a deeper understanding and to propose measures that can counteract the potentially dangerous effects of crosswinds in terms of road safety.…”

“…This involves designing passive (i.e., wind barriers) or active systems (at both infrastructure and vehicle levels) to mitigate crosswindrelated dangers. For example, Semeraro et al [21] investigated the effect of different windbreak fences design on the vehicle response at a tunnel exit in presence of crosswind. They coupled CFD-computed aerodynamic loads to a vehicle and a preview-length driver model.…”

“…Indeed, it is more correct of talking of vehicle-driver system interaction with a crosswind. This is why many studies tried to model the human driver (of course in different ways) to keep the driver in the simulation loop [8,21,22].…”