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Formula One (F1) racing cars are often running at high-speed with the pitching angle changing frequently due to road conditions. These pitching angle changes result in changes to the car’s aerodynamic characteristics that will directly affect handling stability and other performance factors including safety. This paper takes a F1 racing car as the model; the influence of the change of pitching angle on aerodynamic drag force and lift force are investigated. CFD code-PowerFLOW based LBM is used to simulate the aerodynamic characteristics with different pitching angles. The distribution of aerodynamic coefficients, velocity and pressure in the flow field are obtained; and the differences between different pitching angles were analyzed. The results show that as the pitching angle increases, the drag force increases and the lift force decreases. The down-force of the car is mainly supplied by the front wing and the rear wing.

Numerical simulations on the fluid-structure interaction were conducted using commercial software STAR-CCM+ and ABAQUS. The aeroelastic responses of a deflector under several different working conditions were simulated utilizing finite volume and finite element methods to investigate the aeroelastic problem of automotive deflectors. Results showed that the structural response of a top deflector is minimal under the influence of aerodynamics given its large structural stiffness. The size of the top deflector was optimised by using thickness as a variable. The volume and quality of the top deflector were significantly reduced, and its lightweight performance was improved to satisfy the stiffness performance requirement. The vibration of a side deflector structure was mainly induced by the turbulence on the structure surface. The amplitude of vibration was small and the vibration gradually converged in a few seconds without obvious regularity.

Hydraulically damped rubber engine mounts (HDM) are an effective means of providing sufficient isolation from engine vibration while also providing significant damping to control the rigid body motions of the engine during normal driving conditions. This results in a system which exhibits a high degree of non-linearity in terms of both frequency and amplitude. The numerical simulation of vibration isolation characteristics of HDM is difficult due to the fluid-structure interaction between the main supporting rubber and fluid in chambers, the nonlinear material properties, the large deformation of rubber parts, structure contact problems among the inner parts, and the turbulent flow in the inertia track. In this paper an integrated numerical simulation analysis based on structural FEM and a lumped-parameter model of HDM is carried out.

Natural gas is one of the promising alternative fuels due to the low cost, worldwide availability, high knock resistance and low carbon content. Ignition quality is a key factor influencing the combustion performance in natural gas engines. In this study, the effect of pre-chamber geometry on the ignition process and flame propagation was studied under varied initial mixture temperatures and equivalence ratios. The pre-chambers with orifices in different shapes (circular and slit) were investigated. Schlieren method was adopted to acquire the flame propagation. The results show that under the same cross-section area, the slit pre-chamber can accelerate the flame propagation in the early stages. In the most of the cases, the penetration length of the flame jet and flame area development are higher in the early stages of combustion.

Polyvinyl butyral (PVB) film and SentryGlas® Plus (SGP) film have been widely used in automotive windshield and architecture curtain serving as protective interlayer materials. Viscoelasticity is the unique property of such film materials, which can contribute to improving impact resistance and energy absorbing characteristics of laminated glass. In this study, the uniaxial tensile creep and stress relaxation tests are conducted to investigate the viscoelasticity of PVB and SGP films used in laminated glass. Firstly, tensile creep and stress relaxation tests of PVB film (0.76mm) and SGP film with three thickness (0.89mm, 1.14mm and 1.52mm) are conducted using Instron universal testing machine to obtain creep and stress relaxation curves. Afterwards, both viscoelastic models (Burgers model, Maxwell-Weichert model) and empirical equations (Findley power law, Kohlrausch equation) are applied to simulate the creep and stress relaxation results.

A hybrid unstructured Navier-Stokes method is presented for the simulation of the incompressible turbulent flows around vehicle bodies. The hybrid grid system is composed of a structured or semistructured grid for the near-wall viscous region, and an unstructured grid for the remainder of the computational domain. By using prismatic cells, the number of cells in the boundary-layer region becomes approximately one-third of the tetrahedral grid. And the laminated grid rather than the tetrahedral grid is more suitable in the boundary-layer region for accurately computing the viscous terms. The incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are solved on the hybrid grid by a cell-vertex, central differencing finite volume method. The numerical accuracy of the present method is discussed by comparing with the experimental data for the cases of flows around a car model at different ground clearances.

In this work, large eddy simulation (LES) with a K-equation subgrid turbulent kinetic energy model is implemented into the CFD code KIVA3V to study the features of liquid fuel spray and combustion using gradually varying grid in a constant volume chamber. The characteristic time-scale combustion model (CTC) incorporating a turbulent timescale is adopted to predict the combustion process and the SHELL auto-ignition model is used to predict auto-ignition. Combustion is also simulated using Parallel Detailed Chemistry with Lu's n-heptane reduced mechanism (58 species), which has been added into the KIVA3V-LES code. The computational results are compared with Sandia experimental data for non-reacting and reacting cases. As a result, LES can capture the complex structure of the spray and temperature distribution as well as the trend of ignition delay and flame lift-off length variations. Better results are obtained using the Parallel Detailed Chemistry than the CTC model.

The underbody diffusers are used widely in race cars to improve the flow field structure at the bottom of the car and provide enough downforce. In recent years, passenger cars have begun to use bottom diffuser to improve aerodynamic characteristics, so as to reduce drag and increase downforce. In this paper, the aerodynamic characteristics of the bus with different underbody diffuser angles and channel numbers are studied by numerical simulation analysis. Firstly, the aerodynamics of the bus under different diffuser inlet and outlet angles are studied, and then an optimal inlet and outlet angle is determined based on the simulation results. Then, using this angle as a constant, the 2, 3, and 4 channel numbers were chosen as the diffuser channel variables to study the influence of the multiple-channel diffusers on the aerodynamic drag of the vehicle.

The concept of “bionic design” has driven the developments of automotive design. In this paper, a novel beak-shaped automotive tail fin with honeycomb cellular structure is proposed based on the idea of “bionic design”. Beak-shaped appearance is utilized to meet the requirement of aerodynamics performance, inner honeycomb cellular structure is filled to achieve more lightweight space. This paper starts from the establishment of three dimensional (3D) model based on the real characteristics of sparrow’s beak. On this basis, aerodynamic performances of novel beak-shaped tail fin and conventional shark tail fin are analyzed by experiment. Finally, the stiffness and modal analyses of solid beak-shaped tail fin and honeycomb beak-shaped tail fin are carried out respectively. The results indicate that the deformation of solid beak-shaped tail fin and honeycomb beak-shaped tail fin satisfy the basic requirements.

This paper presents a two-layer torque vectoring control strategy for the Formula SAE racing car of Tsinghua University to enhance steering response, lateral stability and track performance. Firstly, the dynamic model of the existing FSAE car is built as parameters of tires, suspensions, motors and aerodynamics are measured and identified. Secondly, this paper develops a two-layer torque vectoring strategy, the upper-layer direct yaw moment (DYC) controller and the lower-layer torque distribution controller are developed in Simulink. The upper-layer sliding mode control DYC controller calculates the target additional yaw moment according to the target yaw rate based on the two-degree-of-freedom (2DOF) reference model, and the sideslip angle is constrained as well.

It aims to study the unsteady flow characteristic of the side-view mirror wake field, and reduce the wind noise by means of unsteady flow control. In this paper, the PIV test in a wind tunnel is used to capture the unsteady flow in the wake field of the side-view mirror, which is used to verify the accuracy of the steady simulation method with RANS after being averaged. Then LES turbulence model is used to obtain the wind noise, and the unsteady flow characteristic like vortex shedding of the side-view mirror is studied. The results show that, in the wake of the side-view mirror, there is a vortex pair similar to Karman Vortex Street. In both horizontal and vertical sections, these two vortexes are respectively separated from the upper and lower edges of the side-view mirror. Accompanied by a significantly uncertain periodic shedding, they continue to extend back until dissipating.