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MRF method is commonly used for predicting cooling performance to design vehicle engine cooling systems. Especially, the practical prediction of the cooling fan performance is one of the important issues. In the design phase of the vehicle development, combinations of multiple parameters are generally examined. Therefore, the steady RANS coupled with MRF method is indispensable. However, unfortunately, the current method does not always give enough accuracy to practical vehicle design. Thus, this paper describes that the method to determine adequate MRF-region to predict the fan performance in practical accuracy.

The critical change in drag occurring on the Ahmed body when the slanted base has an angle of 30° is due to a transition in the wake structure. In a previous study on flow analysis across the Ahmed body, we investigated the unsteady wake experimentally using hot-wire and particle image velocimetry measurements. However, because the experimental analysis yielded limited data, the spatially unsteady wake behaviour, interaction between the trailing vortex and transverse vortices (up/downwash), and flow mechanism near the body were not discussed sufficiently. In this study, the unsteady wake structures were analysed computationally using computational fluid dynamics to understand these issues, and the hypothesis was tested. The slant angle was 27.5°, which is identical to that in the experiment and corresponds to a high drag condition indicated experimentally.

In the winter, windshield glass fogging must be prevented through the intake of outdoor air into a vehicle. However, the corresponding energy loss via the ventilation system cannot be ignored. In the present study, the defogging pattern on the windshield is evaluated and the water vapor transportation in the flow field in the vehicle is analyzed in order to investigate the ventilation load by means of a numerical simulation. Some examined cases involve new outlet positions. Additionally, a new, energy-saving air supply method for defogging, with so-called “double-layer ventilator”, is proposed. In this method, one air jet layer is obtained via a conventional defogging opening in the vicinity of the windshield, supplying an outdoor air intake. The other jet consists of recirculated air that covers the outdoor air, preventing it from mixing with the surrounding air.

Recently, the evaluation of the thermal environment of an engine compartment has become more difficult because of the increased employment and installation of turbochargers. This paper proposes a new prediction model of the momentum source for the turbine of a turbocharger, which is applicable to three-dimensional thermal fluid analyses of vehicle exhaust systems during the actual vehicle development phase. Taking the computational cost into account, the fluid force given by the turbine blades is imitated by adding an external source term to the Navier-Stokes equations corresponding to the optional domain without the computational grids of the actual blades. The mass flow rate through the turbine, blade angle, and number of blade revolutions are used as input data, and then the source is calculated to satisfy the law of the conservation of angular momentum.

The critical change in drag occurs in the Ahmed Body at 30° of the slanted base due to the transition in the wake structure. The distinctive feature of this bi-stage phenomenon, which consists of three-dimensional and quasi-axisymmetric separation states, is that the state drastically changes. Because this feature indicates that each state is stable around a critical angle, the transition is believed to be triggered by some instantaneous disturbances. Therefore, in our previous papers, we have paid attention on the unsteady behavior of the wake to determine the trigger that induces the transition. However, the relationship between the spatial transient behavior of the wake structures and the specific frequencies has not been clarified. Then, we tried to control the degree of interaction of the trailing vortices on the downwash by changing the aspect ratio of the slanted base.