Automotive aerodynamic research often focuses on strongly simplified car models, such as the Ahmed body and the SAE model. Due to their high degree of abstraction, however, interference effects are often neglected which leads to an unrealistic representation of the flow field. Consequently, these results cannot be directly used for the aerodynamic optimization of production vehicles. On the other hand, aerodynamic investigations of real production vehicles are often limited due to the restricted availability of the geometric data. Therefore, a new realistic generic car model for aerodynamic research — the DrivAer body — is proposed. This paper focuses on the development of the model, summarizes first experimental results of the different configurations of the fastback geometry and compares them to numerical simulations performed using the open source software OpenFOAM®.
During the past years the relevance of zero emission vehicles has grown steadily. A lowdrag design of electric vehicles is mandatory to satisfy the cruising range needs. The cooling air drag accounts for an important part of the total drag. At the same time, the cooling requirements of electric vehicles differ from the cooling needs of internal combustion engine vehicles. In this paper, we describe these differences and suggest a systematic approach for the optimization of the cooling duct system of electric vehicles with regard to the internal drag and the interference drag. The optimization will be performed both experimentally in the wind tunnel and numerically through a topology optimization based on the adjoint method.
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