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The oil flow rate in an automotive vane pump varies by virtue of the eccentricity between the inner rotor and the chamber wall. The movement of the chamber wall is facilitated by a ring-spring assembly which is pivoted and moves depending on the balance of system oil pressure and the pre-tensioned spring. In this paper, the ODE of kinetics of the solid piece spring motion is dynamically coupled with CFD simulation of oil flow in a vane pump. A re-meshing step is taken at every time step based on the update of the fluid domain which is determined from the ring position. The algorithm is implemented in the general purpose CFD code PumpLinx and applied to an automotive vane oil pump. The simulation results of pump performance curve are compared with the measurement data, together with the ring positions comparison. A very good agreement is observed between the simulation results and measurement data.

This paper details a comprehensive CFD study of all three variants of the DrivAer car geometries: Fastback, Notchback and Estate configurations. The most realistic geometry was chosen for each of the variants; with detailed underbody, wheels and mirrors. In addition to the closed-grille standard DrivAer models, the open-grille variant has also been simulated. Simulations are performed and compared with experiments both with and without ground simulation. Mesh generation was performed without surface alterations (e.g. wrapping) using a novel Binary-Tree automatic unstructured mesher. All simulations were performed using an enhanced k-ε RANS turbulence model within Simerics MP+. A consistent modeling methodology was developed that was rigorously applied to all variants of the DrivAer model and the simulations are shown to have consistently good agreement with experimental measurements.