Road transportation by trucks is the major part of the goods transportations system in the European Union (EU), and there is a need for increased fuel efficiency. While truck manufacturers already spend significant resources in order to reduce the emissions from their vehicles, most truck manufacturers do not control the shape of the trailer and/or swap bodies. These devices are usually manufactured by different companies that cannot consider the overall aerodynamics around the complete vehicle.By use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and previous wind tunnel experiments, the flow around a simplified generic tractor-trailer model has been investigated. With better understanding of the flow features around the tractor with attached trailer or swap bodies, an improved design of the trailer and swap body can be achieved, which is the aim for the project. Special emphasis is put on achieving simple, easy to install or implement drag-reducing geometrical modifications to the trailer or swap bodies that can be mounted on existing trucks.Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations were used for the conceptual development phase where trends in drag reduction due to the modified geometries were studied using a parameter study, while more advanced scale resolving simulations (SRS) were used in order to investigate the details of the flow fields.The investigation indicates that aerodynamic drag reduction is possible with quite simple geometrical modifications. Some of the results have also been verified through road tests of vehicles in commercial use, which has shown reduced fuel consumption of up to 5%.

The Ahmed body is one of the most well-investigated vehicle bodies for aerodynamic purposes. Despite its simple geometry, the flow around the body, especially at the rear, is very complex as it is dominated by a large wake with strong interaction between vortical structures. In this study, the flow around the 25 deg Ahmed body has been investigated using large eddy simulations and compared to high-resolution particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements. Special emphasis was put on studying three commonly used sub-grid scale (SGS) models and their ability to capture vortical structures around the Ahmed body. The ability of the SGS models to capture the near-wall behavior and small-scale dissipation is crucial for capturing the correct flow field. Very good agreement between simulations and PIV measurements were seen when using the dynamic Smagorinsky-Lilly and the wall-adopting local eddy-viscosity SGS models, respectively. However, the standard Smagorinsky-Lilly model was not able to capture the flow patterns when compared to the PIV measurements due to shortcomings in the near-wall modeling in the standard Smagorinsky-Lilly model, resulting in overpredicted separation.

Considerable amounts of the everyday goods transports are done using light trucks. In the last ten years (2005-2015), the number of light trucks has increased by 33 % in Sweden. The majority of these light trucks are fitted with a swap body and encounter the same problem as many other truck configurations, namely that several different manufacturers contribute to the final shape of the vehicle. Due to this, the aerodynamics of the final vehicle is often not fully considered. Hence there appears to be room for improving the aerodynamic performance. In this study the flow around a swap body fitted to a light truck has been investigated using Computational Fluid Dynamics. The focus has been on improving the shape of the swap body in order to reduce both the aerodynamic drag and fuel consumption, while still keeping it usable for daily operations. Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes simulations were used for concept evaluation while more advanced Detached Eddy Simulations were performed on the best concept in order to investigate details of the flow. Various concepts were evaluated from which it could be seen that a more streamlined top of the swap body together with a lowered top trailing edge had a significant positive effect on the aerodynamic drag. A full scale light truck was equipped with a swap body with with these modifications for road tests. During a test period, a mean fuel consumption reduction of 12 % was measured, thus indicating a significantly reduced aerodynamic drag.

Reducing energy consumption and emissions are ongoing challenges for the transport sector. The increased number of goods transports emphasize these challenges even more, as greenhouse gas emissions from these vehicles increased by 20 % between 1990 and 2013, in Sweden. One special case of goods transports is the transport of timber. Today in Sweden, around 2000 timber trucks transport around six billion ton kilometers every year. For every ton kilometer these vehicles use around 0.025 liter diesel, and there should exist large possibilities to reduce the fuel consumption and the emissions for these vehicles. Timber trucks spend most of their operation time travelling in speeds of around 80 km/h. At this speed aerodynamic drag contributes to around 30 % of the total vehicle resistance, which makes the aerodynamic drag a significant part of the energy consumption. One of the big challenges with timber trucks is that they travel unloaded half of the time. This put higher demands on possible drag reduction modifications, as they need to function and be practical for both when the timber truck is loaded and unloaded. In this study an unloaded timber truck has been investigated by use of computational fluid dynamics. The recently released Stress Blended Eddy Simulation model has been used for simulating the flow over a timber truck at a Reynolds number of 1.1 million, based on the square root of its frontal area. From the results it could be seen that 52.8 % of the drag is generated by the cab. By investigating a drag reduction device that covered the gap between the bulkhead and the first stake pair, a drag reduction up to 6.7 % was possible, which shows potential for simple modifications that not influence the daily usage.

In aerodynamic development of ground vehicles, the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is crucial for improving the aerodynamic performance, stability and comfort of the vehicle. Simulation time and accuracy are two key factors of a well working CFD procedure. Using scale-resolving simulations, accurate predictions of the flow field and aerodynamic forces are possible, but often leads to long simulation time. For a given solver, one of the most significant aspects of the simulation time/cost is the temporal resolution. In this study, this aspect is investigated using the realistic vehicle model DrivAer with the notchback geometry as the test case. To ensure a direct and accurate comparison with wind tunnel measurements, performed at TU Berlin, a large section of the wind tunnel is included in the simulation domain. All simulations are performed at a Reynolds number of 3.12 million, based on the vehicle length. Three spatial resolutions were compared, where it could be seen that a hybrid element mesh consisting of 102 million cells only revealed small differences to the finest mesh investigated, well as showing excellent agreement with wind tunnel measurements. An investigation of the temporal resolution is performed, in order to see its effect on the simulation time/cost and accuracy of the results. The finest temporal resolution resulted in a Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy number less than unity, while the coarsest reached a CFL number of around 100. From these results, it is seen that it is possible to reduce the simulation time with more than 90 % (CFL 20) and still keep sufficient accuracy of the forces and important features of the flow field.

The introduction of the Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure causes a significant challenge for the automotive industry, as it increases the importance of efficient aerodynamics and demands how variations of optional extras affect the car’s fuel consumption and emissions. This may lead to a huge number of combinations of optional extras that may need to be aerodynamically analyzed and possibly optimized, being to resource-consuming to be done with wind tunnel testing merely. Reynolds Average Navier-Stoles (RANS) coupled with Large Eddy Simulations (LES) have shown potential for accurate simulation for automotive applications for reasonable computational cost. In this paper, three hybrid RANS-LES models are investigated on the DrivAer notchback and fastback car bodies and compared to wind tunnel measurements. Several yaw angles are investigated to see the model’s ability to capture small and large changes of the flow field. It is seen that the models generally are in good agreement with the measurement, but only one model is able to capture the behavior seen in the measurements consistently. This is connected to the complex flow over the rear window, which is important to capture for accurate force predictions.