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A computational study of the vehicle aerodynamics influenced by the wake of the rotating wheel taking into account a detailed rim geometry is presently performed. The car configuration corresponds to a full-scale (1:1) notchback configuration of the well-known ‘DrivAer’ vehicle model, Heft et al. [1]. The objective of the present work is to investigate the performance of some popular turbulence models in conjunction with different methods for handling the wheel rotation – rotating wall velocity, ‘multiple reference frame’ and ‘sliding grid algorithm’. The specific focus hereby is on a near-wall RANS eddy-viscosity model based on elliptic-relaxation, sensitized to resolve fluctuating turbulence by introducing a specifically modeled production term in the scale-supplying equation, motivated by the Scale-Adaptive Simulation approach (SAS, [2]), proposed by Krumbein et al. [3].

The “Water Spider Geometry” (WSG) configuration, representing a newly developed reference test sample designed to suitably investigate the flow and heat transfer processes relevant to cooling systems of internal combustion engines, was computationally investigated by applying a recently proposed Reynolds Stress model called the “Elliptic-Blending Model” (EBM). The WSG configuration resembles a specifically configured pipe geometry that appropriately mimics the flow phenomena encountered in cooling channels of realistic internal combustion engine, such as flow impingement and bifurcation, multiple deflections and flow confluence. The reference database, consisting of mean flow and turbulence fields, was provided by a Large-Eddy Simulation. The EBM formulation has been intensively validated by calculating numerous isothermal wall-bounded flows. The present work focuses on testing the EBM predictive performances under the conditions of non-isothermal flow scenarios.