Numerical Investigations of the Dust Deposition Behavior at Light Commercial Vehicles 2023-01-5022

Dry dust testing of vehicles on unpaved dust roads plays a crucial role in the development process of automotive manufacturers. One of the central aspects of the test procedure is ensuring the functionality of locking systems in the case of dust ingress and keeping the dust below a certain concentration level inside the vehicle. Another aspect is the customer comfort because of dust deposited on the surface of the car body. This also poses a safety risk to customers when the dust settles on safety-critical parts such as windshields and obstructs the driver’s view. Dust deposition on sensors is also safety critical and is becoming more important because of the increasing amount of sensors for autonomous driving. Nowadays, dust tests are conducted experimentally at dust proving grounds. To gain early insights and avoid costly physical testing, numerical simulations are considered a promising approach.

Simulations of vehicle contamination by dry dust have been studied in the past. However, they lack detailed tire resuspension models, and none of the publications focus on the dust deposition at the vehicle in detail, such as door gaps and locks. Moreover, the emphasis of many authors is the environmental impact of vehicles resulting from non-exhaust emissions, such as tire and road wear, brake wear, and dust emissions.

This paper introduces a novel method for simulating the production of dust resulting from vehicles driving on a dry and dusty, unpaved road, as well as the subsequent deposition mechanisms that occur within door gaps and locks. To achieve this, both a basic, generic vehicle model and a more complex, detailed model of a Volkswagen (VW) Caddy are used in the context of a multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation with Lagrangian particles.