Investigation of aerodynamic performance of high-speed train by detached eddy simulation

Abstract

The detached eddy simulation (DES) is employed to study the flows around the high speed train at speed of 500km/h. Its object is to evaluate the aerodynamic performance. As we know, for high speed trains at speeds bigger than 250 km/h, most (about 75-80%) of the total resistance is caused by aerodynamic drag. Hence, it is important to accurately predict the aerodynamic drag for the designer of new shape of train. To achieve this goal, one of the challenge problems is to capture the massively separations in the wake region which are rarely explored in the literature. To further simplified the problem, the study is only applied to the simplified modelling train which does not include items like bogies, pantographs etc. The results show that DES can capture the separation as well as the small scales of eddies in the wake region. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.