Validation of Experimental and Numerical Techniques for Flow Analysis over an Ahmed Body

Abstract

The impact of improvement in vehicle aerodynamics mainly reflects in lower fuel consumption and lower carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. The governments of many countries support continuous aerodynamics' improvement programs as a way of mitigating the energy crisis and atmospheric pollution. This work has the main goal to validate experimental and numerical techniques for application in road vehicles. The experimental results were obtained through the analysis of the flow around a standard body with simple geometry called Ahmed Body, using hot wire anemometry from experiments in wind tunnel. It was also proposed a computational validation using a commercial software (Star CCM +) to further analyze the flow and to corroborate the experimental results. Both results were compared and allowed characterizing the flow around the vehicle. The results obtained analyzing the Ahmed Body aimed further application on aerodynamics of heavy-duty vehicles, which is an ongoing research being developed at the Experimental Aerodynamics Research Center – CPAERO, in Brazil.