In order to fulfill coming regulations on vehicle emissions all reasons for aerodynamic drag have to be engaged. Accounting for approximate 25 percent of the total drag, wheels and wheel houses have to be optimized aerodynamically. Therefore, one needs to understand the fundamental flow structures occurring at a rotating, automotive wheel. Most published isolated wheel investigations, however, deal with racing car tires which do not contain lateral grooves in their tread patterns and which have a fundamentally different width to height ratio than tires for passenger cars. In this paper, the flow around a rotating isolated 225/55 R17 production car tire, which is deformed by a realistic vertical load, is investigated experimentally and compared with computational results from the Lattice-Boltzmann solver Exa PowerFLOW. It is shown that the presence of a detailed tread pattern introduces flow feature changes which are difficult to reproduce in the numerical simulation. Hence, different boundary conditions are applied on the tire geometry aiming at closing the gap between numerical simulation and experiment. Eventually, the authors give an outlook on ongoing and future investigations of non-isolated wheel and tire aerodynamics in the context of a complete passenger car.
Investigations on the flow around wheels using different road simulation tools
2013
12 Seiten, Bilder, 15 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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