NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATIONS OF DRAG FORCE ON SCALED CAR MODEL

The numerical simulation and wind tunnel experiment were involved to observe the aerodynamic characteristics of car model. The investigation of aerodynamic characteristics on car model were difficult by using wind tunnel. It provides more comprehensive experimental data as a reference to validate the numerical simulation. In the wind tunnel experiments, the pressures on various ports over the car model were measured by using pressure scanner (64 bit channels). The drag force was calculated based on experimental and computational results. The realizable k-epsilon model was employed to compute the aerodynamic drag and surface pressure distribution over a car model simulated at various wind velocity. The tetrahedron mesh approach was used to discretize the computational domain for accuracy. The computational results showed a good agreement with the experimental data and the results revealed that the induced aerodynamic drag determines the best car shape. In order to reveal the internal connection between the aerodynamic drag and wake vortices, the turbulent kinetic, re-circulation length, position of vortex core, and velocity profile in the wake were investigated by numerical analysis.