The range of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) is a very important factor for a customer’s choice and utilization behavior. One use case is towing a trailer on long distance drives, where the aerodynamic drag is the dominating factor regarding the possible range. Therefore, it is important to know the influence of a towed trailer behind a passenger car.
Wind tunnel investigations of two exemplary passenger cars, one sedan and one sport utility vehicle (SUV), with several trailers are presented. As expected, the aerodynamic drag of a car/trailer unit rises massively compared to the stand-alone car. Compared to the sedan, the SUV builds a more effective ramp-up body for the trailers which results in lower drag values.
Accompanying computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed, allowing a detailed aerodynamic analysis of the car/trailer interaction. A very good agreement between the CFD simulations and the wind tunnel measurements is found. This gives confidence in predicting the aerodynamic drag of new car/trailer combinations with numerical methods.
Investigations into the Aerodynamic Influence of Trailers Towed by Battery Electric Passenger Cars
Proceedings
2022-03-15
12 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
German
TOWED VEHICLE DRIVETRAIN TEST PROCEDURE—PASSENGER CARS
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|TOWED VEHICLE/WRECKER ATTACHMENT TEST PROCEDURE—PASSENGER CARS
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Engineering Index Backfile | 1934
|