Simulation on fuel consumption reduction of an urban concept car for energy-efficient competition

Abstract

In this work, a numerical simulation to estimate fuel consumption reduction of an urban concept car has been carried out. The urban concept car, named as Horas Mesin USU, has been designed for energy efficient competition. A set of governing equations upon the computational domain is developed and solved using CFD FLUENT commercial code. The turbulent flow is closed using k-epsilon turbulence model. In the results, pathline, velocity vector and pressure distribution are plotted. By using the pressure distributions, drag and lift coefficients are calculated. In order to make a comparison, the aerodynamic characteristics of the present design is compared with commercial city car Ford-Fiesta. In addition, several modifications are proposed to the original design. The CFD results are employed to estimate fuel consumption of all models. In the results an equation to estimate fuel consumption has been proposed. It was shown that by employing the modifications, 28.8% averaged fuel consumption reduction can be resulted.