Numerical and Experimental Investigations on the Aerodynamic Characteristic of Three Typical Passenger Vehicles

The numerical simulation and wind tunnel experiment were employed to investigate the aerodynamic characteristics of three typical rear shapes: fastback, notchback and squareback. The object was to investigate the sensibility of aerodynamic characteristic to the rear shape, and provide more comprehensive experimental data as a reference to validate the numerical simulation. In the wind tunnel experiments, the aerodynamic six components of the three models with the yaw angles range from -15 degrees and 15 degrees were measured. The realizable k-epsilon model was employed to compute the aerodynamic drag, lift and surface pressure distribution at a zero yaw angle. In order to improve the calculation efficiency and accuracy, a hybrid Tetrahedron-Hexahedron-Pentahedral-Prism mesh strategy was used to discretize the computational domain. The computational results showed a good agreement with the experimental data and the results revealed that different rear shapes would induce very different aerodynamic characteristic, and it was difficult to determine the best shape. For example, the fastback would obtain very low aerodynamic drag, but it would induce positive lift which was not conducive to stability at high speed, and it also would induce bad crosswind stability. In order to reveal the internal connection between the aerodynamic drag and wake vortices, the turbulent kinetic, recirculation length, position of vortex core and velocity profile in the wake were investigated by numerical simulation and PIV experiment.