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Computational Simulation of a Heavy Vehicle Trailer Wake

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Applied and Computational Mechanics ((LNACM,volume 19))

Abstract

To better understand the flow mechanisms that contribute to the aerodynamic drag of heavy vehicles, unsteady largeeddy simulations are performed to model the wake of a truncated trailer geometry above a no-slip surface. The truncation of the heavy vehicle trailer is done to reduce the computational time needed to perform the simulations. Both unsteady and time-averaged results are presented from these simulations for two grids. A comparison of velocity fields with those obtained from a wind tunnel study demonstrate that there is a distinct difference in the separated wake of the experimental and computational results, perhaps indicating the influence of the geometry simplification, turbulence model, boundary conditions, or other aspects of the chosen numerical approach.

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ortega, J.M., Dunn, T., McCallen, R., Salari, K. (2004). Computational Simulation of a Heavy Vehicle Trailer Wake. In: McCallen, R., Browand, F., Ross, J. (eds) The Aerodynamics of Heavy Vehicles: Trucks, Buses, and Trains. Lecture Notes in Applied and Computational Mechanics, vol 19. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-44419-0_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-44419-0_22

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-53586-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44419-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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