Experimental Investigation of the Wake Structure of the Generic Truck Utility with Correlation to Common Numerical Models for Simulating Turbulence
2022-01-1083
03/29/2022
- Event
- Content
- The aerodynamic forces on bluff body vehicles are often dominated by off-body flow structures in the downstream wake of the vehicle, however attempts to correlate computational methods to the real-world have typically relied on surface pressures and integral forces. The Generic Truck Utility (GTU) was developed to provide a more realistic test box for understanding the aerodynamics of such vehicles. In this study the GTU geometry has been used to build a scale model for wind tunnel testing with wake measurements to compare to a range of results from computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The wind tunnel data includes integral forces, surface pressures and wake measurements of total pressure. The CFD results include a range of RANS turbulence models from one-equation Spalart-Allmaras to more recent elliptic-blending models as well as transient DES results, all run across meshes of increasing refinement in the wake region. Some interesting observations on mesh sensitivity can be made for both the steady-state and transient solutions. The wind tunnel results shows strong correlation in flow and overall forces with the transient results, as well as wake structure details that are not well predicted by any method. It is hoped that the results will help in refining the application of computational methods to better predict the entire flow field, leading to better understanding of the aerodynamics which will ultimately allow for developing more fuel-efficient vehicles.
- Citation
- Mosedale, A., and Pithwa, P., "Experimental Investigation of the Wake Structure of the Generic Truck Utility with Correlation to Common Numerical Models for Simulating Turbulence," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-1083, 2022, .