The effect of rear cavity modifications on the drag and flow field topology of a Square Back Ahmed Body

Abstract

This work presents a numerical investigation of turbulent flow over a simplified vehicle model called the Square Back Ahmed Body (SBAB). The simulations are performed at Reynolds number 1 × 105 using the k − [Formula: see text] SSTSAS turbulence model. The numerical results for the standard reference model, that is, SBAB, have been validated against available experimental data and numerical simulations. The performance of a passive flow controller with four variants on the mean wake topology and the resultant drag reduction is evaluated. The four variants are; (i) straight cavity, (ii) straight cavity with rounded edges, (iii) C-shaped cavity, and (iv) tapered cavity. For a straight cavity with a depth equal to 33.33% of the body height, drag is lowered by 5.63%. With the same cavity depth, rounding the straight cavity edges reduces the drag by 10.67% owing to the streamlining and shortening of the recirculation region. For a C-shaped cavity, the amount of drag reduction increased slightly by 1% more than that off straight cavity with rounded edges, due to improvement in the base pressure distribution compared to that of the latter case. Tapering the cavity edges at an angle of 6° gave a significant drag reduction of 22.55% primarily due to a tremendous decrease in wake size. The drag reduction achieved in all the cases results from the modification in the mean wake topology induced by afterbody shape remodeling. The power spectra of the evolution of the lift coefficient over time reveal a noticeable decrement in the flow randomness with the inclusion of a cavity and its modifications, which interprets the mitigation of the chaotic nature in the wake. The cavity presence has also increased the vorticity spreading rate in the mixing layer and produced significant attenuation of Turbulent Kinetic Energy (TKE).