Search Results

Contamination of vehicle rear surfaces is a significant issue for customers. Along with being unsightly, it can degrade the performance of rear camera systems and lighting, prematurely wear rear screens and wipers, and transfer soil to customers moving goods through the rear tailgate. Countermeasures, such as rear camera wash or automated deployment add expense and complexity for OEMs. This paper presents a rear surface contamination model for a fully detailed SUV based on the use of a highly-resolved time-accurate aerodynamic simulation realised through the use of a commercial Lattice-Boltzmann solver, combined with Lagrangian Particle Tracking to simulate droplet advection and surface water dynamics via a thin film model. Droplet break-up due to aerodynamic shear is included, along with splash and stripping from the surface film. The effect of two-way momentum coupling is included in a sub-set of simulations.

Cooling drag, typically known as the difference in drag coefficient between open and closed cooling configurations, has traditionally proven to be a difficult flow phenomenon to predict using computational fluid dynamics. It was seen as an academic yardstick before the advent of grille shutter systems. However, their introduction has increased the need to accurately predict the drag of a vehicle in a variety of different cooling configurations during vehicle development. This currently represents one of the greatest predictive challenges to the automotive industry due to being the net effect of many flow field changes around the vehicle. A comprehensive study is presented in the paper to discuss the notion of defining cooling drag as a number and to explore its effect on three automotive models with different cooling drag deltas using the commercial CFD solvers; STARCCM+ and Exa PowerFLOW.