Sustainable mobility is a highly important subject. The global energy consumption related to personal transportation is predicted to increase significantly by 2035. This challenges the automotive industry to push development towards increasingly energy efficient vehicles. Many important properties of a passenger car such as fuel consumption, stability, cooling and aero acoustics are affected by the aerodynamic characteristics of the vehicle. Reducing the aerodynamic drag of road vehicles, will be one important part in reducing the energy consumption. Wheels and wheel housings represent a significant part of the aerodynamic drag an a modern passenger car, up to 25 percent. Part of the drag originates from the wheels and wheel housings directly, but also due to significant interactions with surrounding flow regions. In order to increase the understanding of such flow interactions numerical tools are often utilised as experimental data is often limited. The flow field around rotating wheels is highly complex, and accurately capturing the important flow structures is an important requirement of the numerical tool. This study focus an prediction of aerodynamic drag trends of a passenger car using different wheel designs. Scanned tyre data as well as CAD tyres and CAD tyres with longitudinal grooves matching the tread of the scanned tyres were used for a number of different wheels. The numerical results were correlated with experimental results from the Volvo Aerodynamic Wind Tunnel, focusing an drag and cooling drag predictions, as well as flow field correlation, when possible. Results show that by implementing detailed tyre geometries in the CFD simulations, an improved correlation with corrected wind tunnel data was achieved. Results also show that drag differences due to increase tyre geometry detailing can be of the same order of magnitude as the drag differences due to different rim designs.
Prediction of aerodynamic drag for different rim designs using varied wheel modelling in CFD
2012
14 Seiten, 17 Bilder, 20 Quellen
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Englisch
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