COMPUTATIONAL STUDY OF UNSTEADY ROAD VEHICLE AERODYNAMICS INCLUDING FLUID-STRUCTURE INTERACTION

CASTRO; HUGO G.; PAZ, RODRIGO RAFAEL; STORTI, MARIO ALBERTO; SONZOGNI, V. E.

Mendoza

Congreso; ENIEF 2013 XX Congreso sobre Métodos Numéricos y sus Aplicaciones; 2013

UTN Facultad Regional Mendoza

Abstract. In the study of road vehicle aerodynamics it is often assumed that the vehicle is a rigidbody, rigidly attached to the ground. However, that is not the case of real vehicles on the road. Theyinteract with the incident wind, which changes intensity and direction in an unpredictable way and alsowith bumps and surface imperfections of the road. The interaction between wind and vehicle can benumerically modeled as a fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem while the road imperfections as anstochastic input force in the system.However, even at present days, with large computational resources available, experiments are pre-ferred to numerical simulation in the study of vehicle aerodynamics and even in the analysis of FSIproblems due to the reliability gained by wind tunnels. Nevertheless, this experimental tool has alsoshortcomings that can be corrected and even strengths that can be improved by using numerical simula-tion.In this work the feasibility of using a computational code to reproduce the experimental conditionsin a wind tunnel test section is investigated. This study is focused not only on the aerodynamics of asimplified road vehicle but also on its dynamic interaction with an incident wind flow. The fluid-structureinteraction model was tested and the results demonstrated that the computational tools developed in thiswork enable us to reproduce and/or to assist experimental studies.