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Cargo trucks are one of the most important and flexible ways of moving cargo within inlands. In some countries, such as Brazil, the economy relies on them to transport all kinds of products, from field and factory to consumer. In order to reduce freight prices, beside route optimization, truck manufactures started to focus on the aerodynamics development of those vehicles, in order to improve the efficiency, reducing fuel consumption and emissions. Although the truck aerodynamics development is important, most vehicles are not manufactured or don’t consider the truck trailer, which plays a key role in the full aerodynamics performance of the truck, once it might increase the front area and also change the overall aero performance.

Moving ground simulation plays an important role on aerodynamic studies of road vehicles, in order to reproduce the real movement condition. Due to cost of implementing a moving ground, many wind tunnels employ static ground simulation with boundary layer control. The work here presented aims to study using Computational Fluid Dynamics - CFD simulations the effect of using moving ground simulations with rotating wheels against a baseline configuration using both static ground and wheels over a small pick-up truck. The study aims to determine the influence of using different flow velocities on the drag coefficient measured over this vehicle using both ground configuration. For the cases here presented we performed steady state Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes - RANS numerical simulations, following similar setup as the industry best practices and using the same mesh.