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The aims of this study are to understand the mechanism of dew condensation and try to prevent it on automobile headlamp. In this case, it is necessary to build the computational model of the headlamp with all details accurately. In addition, the simulation framework for predicting the turbulent flow field has to be accompanied with the high temperature heat source and consider high accuracy of the wall heat transfer in the running environment of a vehicle. Moreover, it is a challenging task that using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) to understand the mechanism of the flow field inside the light emitting diode (LED) headlamp with a rotating fan to cool the light sources because of the complicated internal structures and significant heat transfer. In this paper, the method of compressible turbulence has been constructed which based on hierarchical cartesian grid using the HPC (High Performance Computing) environment.

On-road turbulences caused by sources such as atmospheric wind and other vehicles influence the flow field and increases the drag in a vehicle. In this study, we focused on a scenario involving a passing vehicle and investigated its effect on the physical mechanism of the drag increase in order to establish a technique for reducing this drag. Firstly, we conducted on-road measurements of two sedan-type vehicles passed by a truck. Their aerodynamic drag estimated from the base pressure measurements showed different increment when passed by the truck. This result raised the possibility of reducing the drag increase by a modification of the local geometry. Then, we conducted wind tunnel measurements of a simplified one-fifth scale vehicle model in quasi-steady state, in order to understand the flow mechanism of the drag increase systematically.

A road vehicle’s cornering motion is known to be a compound motion composed mainly of forward, sideslip and yaw motions. But little is known about the aerodynamics of cornering because little study has been conducted in this field. By clarifying and understanding a vehicle’s aerodynamic characteristics during cornering, a vehicle’s maneuvering stability during high-speed driving can be aerodynamically improved. Therefore, in this study, the aerodynamic characteristics of a vehicle’s cornering motion, i.e. the compound motion of forward, sideslip and yaw motions, were investigated. We also considered proposing an aerodynamics evaluation method for vehicles in dynamic maneuvering. Firstly, we decomposed cornering motion into yaw and sideslip motions. Then, we assumed that the aerodynamic side force and yaw moment of a cornering motion could be expressed by superposing linear expressions of yaw motion parameters and those of sideslip motion parameters, respectively.

Unsteady aerodynamic forces acting on vehicles during a dynamic steering action were investigated by numerical simulation, with a special focus on the vehicles' yaw and lateral motions. Two sedan-type vehicles with slightly different geometries at the front pillar, side skirt, under cover, and around the front wheel were adopted for comparison. In the first report, surface pressure on the body and total pressure behind the front wheel were measured in an on-road experiment. Then the relationships between the vehicles' lateral dynamic motion and unsteady aerodynamic characteristics during cornering motions were discussed. In this second report, the vehicles' meandering motions observed in on-road measurements were modeled numerically, and sinusoidal motions of lateral, yaw, and slip angles were imposed. The responding yaw moment was phase averaged, and its phase shift against the imposed slip angle was measured to assess the aerodynamic damping.

We investigate the pitching stability characteristics of sedan-type vehicles using large-eddy simulation (LES) technique. Pitching oscillation is a commonly encountered phenomenon when a vehicle is running on a road. Attributed to the change in a vehicle's position during pitching, the flow field around it is altered accordingly. This causes a change in aerodynamic forces and moments exerted on the vehicle. The resulting vehicle's response is complex and assumed to be unsteady, which is too complicated to be interpreted in a conventional wind tunnel or using a numerical method that relies on the steady state solution. Hence, we developed an LES method for solving unsteady aerodynamic forces and moments acting on a vehicle during pitching. The pitching motion of a vehicle during LES was produced by using the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian technique. We compared two simplified vehicle models representing actual sedan-type vehicles with different pitching stability characteristics.

Large eddy simulation based on high-performance computing technique was conducted to investigate the unsteady aerodynamic forces acting on a full-scale heavy duty truck subjected to sudden crosswind. The CFD results were applied to evaluate the effect of the unsteady external forces on a vehicle motion, as a first step toward a more reliable vehicle motion analysis. As the first report, the numerical method was validated on the DNW wind-tunnel data by comparing the time-averaged drag and lateral forces at various yawing angles up to 10 degrees. Then the method was applied to the case when the vehicle goes through the crosswind region. The time series of the aerodynamic forces were acquired and discussed through the visualization of instantaneous flow structures around the vehicle. It was observed that drastic undershooting and overshooting of the yawing moment acts on the vehicle during the rushing in and out process.

The effect of unsteady aerodynamics on the motion of a heavy duty truck subjected to sudden crosswinds was analyzed in vehicle-dynamics simulations. Large eddy simulation based on high-performance computing (LES-HPC) was applied to evaluate the effect of unsteady external forces on vehicle motion as a first step toward a more reliable vehicle motion analysis. Before the vehicle-dynamics simulations, the steady and unsteady aerodynamics of a simplified model of a heavy truck developed in our first report were analyzed by HPC-LES for various aerodynamic yaw angle conditions. On the basis of these aerodynamic analyses, two vehicle-dynamics simulations were conducted for transient crosswind conditions. One simulation was coupled with unsteady aerodynamic forces and the other applied a conventional approach with quasi-steady aerodynamics.

CFD is becoming an inevitable modern engineering tool in the vehicle aerodynamics. A LES based CFD approach is proposed for analysis for flows with complex geometrical configurations to which detailed experiments, high grid-density LES or DNS cannot be applicable. How CFD results should be evaluated for cases in which the related experiments are not available. The procedure proposed consists of four stages, i.e., inspections of solutions with coarse and fine meshes, reconfirmation of energy spectrum, references to the similar experiments, explanations of results obtained. The procedures are applied to the underbody flows with a semi-complex underbody configuration.

In the present study, two kinds of simplified vehicle models, which can reproduce flow structures around the two sedan-type vehicles in the previous study, are constructed for the object and the unsteady flow structures are extracted using Large-Eddy Simulation technique. The numerical results are validated in a stationary condition by comparing the results with a wind-tunnel experiment and details of steady and unsteady flow characteristics around the models, especially above the trunk deck, are investigated. In quasi- and non- stationary manner with regard to vehicle pitch motion, unsteady flow characteristics are also investigated and their relations to an aerodynamic stability are discussed.

One of the world's largest unsteady turbulence simulations of flow around a formula car was conducted using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) on the Earth Simulator in Japan. The main objective of our study is to investigate the validity of LES for the assessment of vehicle aerodynamics, as an alternative to a conventional wind tunnel measurement or the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulation. The aerodynamic forces estimated by LES show good agreement with the wind tunnel data (within several percent!) and various unsteady flow features around the car is visualized, which clearly indicate the effectiveness of large-scale LES in the very near future for the computation of flow around vehicles with complex configurations.

This paper describes results of the correlation tests between several full-scale automotive wind tunnels in Japan. The tests were carried out during FY 2003 by members of the working group for wind tunnel correlation test, which was organized in JSAE Vehicle Aerodynamics Research Committee. Five wind tunnels were selected, i.e., three open test section type wind tunnels and two closed ones. Four test models were selected, i.e., sedan, station wagon, minivan and hatch back car, all of which are current production models. Tests were done with EADE test conditions. Correlation formulas for drag coefficient, which are based on the previous methods by Mercker and Wiedemann [13] and Mercker [3, 10] respectively for open and closed test section type wind tunnels, were used. Also considered were the differences of the boundary layer thickness between five wind tunnels.

Computational fluid dynamics(CFD) has come out as a modern alternative for reducing the use of wind tunnels in automotive engineering. CFD is now being intensively applied to various stages of aerodynamic design of automobiles. However, the present CFD technology has still many computational problems to be solved in terms of turbulence treatment, numerical method/scheme, etc., i.e., it is still difficult to find an appropriate solution in terms of fluid mechanics, since it strongly depends on the above numerical factors. This review paper describes the following CFD methods now available and their present applications, mainly in the area of vehicle aerodynamics, and shows the present limitations of the various methods: panel method, k-ε turbulence model, Large Eddy Simulation, and quasi-direct simulation with 3rd-order upwind numerical scheme.