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For a typical passenger ground vehicle, the rotating treaded tires and wheel housings typically account for up to 25% of the total vehicle aerodynamic drag. Due to the importance of tires and their treads to the overall vehicle aerodynamics, it’s critically important for aerodynamics departments to have accurate simulations that can predict the effects of rotating tires. Accurate prediction of flow around a tire is a complex phenomenon and is affected by details of tire features such as tread pattern, air pressure, and tire deformation. In particular, the physics of the tire treads spatial movement and deformation (i.e. expansion, contraction, sidewall bulge, and squeezing of airflow) as the tires rotate and come in contact with ground, especially around the contact patch, is vitally important in determining accurate wheel wakes, underbody flow, and the overall wake of the vehicle.

As the automotive industry is quickly changing towards electric vehicles, we can highlight the importance of aerodynamics and its critical role in reaching extended battery ranges for electric cars. With all new smooth underbodies, a lot of attention has turned into the effects of rim designs and tires brands and the management of these tire wakes with the vehicle. Tires are one of the most challenging areas for aerodynamic drag prediction due to its unsteady behavior and rubber deformation. With the simulation technologies evolving fast regarding modeling spinning tires for aerodynamics, this paper takes the prior work and data completed by the authors and investigates the impact on the flow fields and aerodynamic forces using the most recent developments of an Immerse Boundary Method (IBM). IBM allows us to mimic realistically a rotating and deformed tire using Lattice Boltzmann methods.