Abstract
This paper presents the aerodynamic study of a small car, which participated in Shell Ecomarathon Europe competition in the Urban Concept Hydrogen class. The goal is to understand the flow field around the vehicle. First, the flow is studied numerically using computational aerodynamics. The numerical simulation is carried out by means of CFD Fluent in order to obtain the drag force experienced by the vehicle and also the flow field. Then the flow field around the car is studied in a wind tunnel by means of particle image velocimetry (PIV). The comparison of the flow fields obtained numerically and experimentally shows good correspondence. The obtained results are very helpful for future car development and permit to improve the drag and to obtain a good stability.
Highlights
Vehicle aerodynamics is very important and has a significant impact on its general performance, especially on fuel consumption
It should be noted that the field of vehicle aerodynamics is very large, has different tasks depending on car type and it is difficult to summarize all existing problems
The authors focus their research on the aerodynamics of small car, which participated in Shell Eco-marathon Europe competition in the Urban Concept Hydrogen class
Summary
Vehicle aerodynamics is very important and has a significant impact on its general performance, especially on fuel consumption. The aerodynamics of a small car to participate in the Shell Eco-marathon has been studied by a limited number of researchers At first glance it seems that aerodynamic forces can be neglected due to the low vehicle speed. The authors in [6] simulated a flow around a small electric car for urban mobility at the stage of preliminary design They studied the grid dependency of the solution and showed that the drag coefficient of 0,129 varies by less than 3% when the nodes increase from nearly 0,65 million to 2,4 million. The aim of this work is to simulate the flow around an existing model in order to obtain the aerodynamic drag and lift forces and the flow field around the vehicle. This study will be useful for further amendments of vehicle shape for future races
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