Brazil is significant grain (soy, corn, beans and rice) producer in the planet and the road transportation is needed even when rail and maritime mode is used.There are opportunities to improve the grain road transportation efficiency. This paper presents one opportunity which is the aerodynamic drag reduction and therefore the fuel and energy consumption reduction on grain road transportation.This paper will discuss some alternatives to reduce aerodynamic drag on such application considering Brazilian market regulation which has a low limit for front axle load (lower than European regulation for instance) and limit the total composition length. As an example of some alternatives to reduce drag there is the frontal area reduction and trailer to cab gap reduction. Some of those alternatives were implemented on a concept truck briefly presented on this paper, which was tested on a real application, this paper will illustrate some of those alternatives implemented.Also, this paper presents the aerodynamic analysis using CFD and the strategy used to run quicker analysis using steady state k-epsilon turbulence model rather than transient DES, such strategy shows adequate correlation with wind tunnel tests. Also, this paper briefly describes the strategy to correlate the real application which has random yaw angles and air speed with CFD simulation.The authors intend that the alternatives to improve transported efficiency presented in this work can influence the market and can be applied on the truck grain transport application saving fuel/energy and cost which could be translated on lower food cost and sustainable transportation.
Aerodynamic Analysis of a Concept Truck and Trailer for Grain Transportation
Sae Technical Papers
12th SAE BRASIL Colloquium on Suspensions and Road Implements & Engineering Exhibition ; 2023
2023-07-25
Conference paper
English
Aerodynamic Analysis of a Concept Truck and Trailer for Grain Transportation
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