Simulation of Aerodynamic Effects of Trucks

Abstract

The paper deals with the aerodynamic effects resulting from the existance of a gap between a cab and trailer and with the question how CFD can be utilized to reproduce the experimental findings. Thus a first attempt is made to simulate experiments made at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Southern California. The numerical simulation makes use of a CFD code based on the unstructured hybrid approach, namely the TAU-Code, and tries to simulate the experiments including the wind tunnel set-up. The influence of different grids and of unsteady versus steady effects is tackled. Finally some first conclusions are drawn, indicating that more effort has to be undertaken to answer some open questions.