In this paper, the availability of Detached-Eddy Simulations (DES) for simulating unsteady crosswind aerodynamics in industrial applications is explored and reported. The flow around a simple car geometry under headwind, steady crosswind and time-dependent wind gust respectively, is analysed for two different types of mesh using a commercial software, STAR-CD. The typical Reynolds number of the flow cases studied is 2.0 · 10 6 based on the vehicle length. The performances of polyhedral meshes together with a comparable hexahedral mesh are evaluated for capturing the time development of the flow structures during a gust. From the results presented, it can be concluded that the aerodynamic coefficients can be reliably calculated using both polyhedral and hexahedral meshes, although the fine turbulent structures in the wake are better captured with the hexahedral mesh. Using turbulence methods like DES in order to resolve the flow scales provides a significant insight for designing a ground vehicle and, due to the reasonable computational times involved, can hence be foreseen to be incorporated in a design process in a near future.
The relative flexibility of nowadays simulation techniques offers an alternative way to experiments in order to investigate unsteady crosswind aerodynamics in an industrial framework. In this study, time-accurate simulations, Detached-Eddy Simulations (DES), are used to simulate the flow around a simple vehicle shape, the so-called Windsor model. The ReL of the corresponding flow case is 2.0 · 106. The influence of different deterministic models of wind gusts on the aerodynamic loads and moments are studied. The wind gusts are varied in the stream-wise and the vertical direction. The magnitude of the gusts models corresponds to a yaw angle of 20°. The aerodynamic loads calculated show a large excess of drag coupled with a reduction of the pitch moment. In addition, although the side force has a smooth variation in the gust, overshoots up to 18% higher than the steady value of yaw moment are also observed.
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