The aerodynamic flow over a bluff body in ground proximity: CFD prediction of road vehicle aerodynamics using unstructured grids

The prediction of external automobile aerodynamics using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is still in its infancy. The restrictions on grid size for practical use limit the ability of most organisations to predict the full flow over an automobile. Some insight into the flow over a passenger car can be made by examining the flow over a bluff body in close proximity to the ground. One such body is the Ahmed body composed of a rounded front, straight mid-section and variable slant-rear section. This body exhibits many of the 3D flow structures exhibited by passenger cars. The main feature of the flow around this body is the change in flow structure as the angle of the slant surface at the rear of the body is increased. The flow starts fully attached and ends fully separated. In between these two regimes is a third high drag regime. The flow structure is characterised by strong counter-rotating longitudinal vortices originating from the interaction between the flow from the sides and top of the body, and a small separation from the top/slant edge on the centre-plane of the body. The flow reattaches to the slant surface and the low-pressure fluid within the separation bubble increases the drag considerably. The use of CFD incorporating tine averaged statistical turbulence models to reproduce these flow patterns is assessed in this study. Initial work concentrated on evaluating structured grid methods for this flow type. Some success was achieved with the flow fields for the attached and fully separated cases but the third high drag regime was not predicted. The flow field also exhibited a grid dependent flow structure and drag result. To examine these effects further without high grid overheads an unstructured mesh generator was developed and used to provide meshes with more grid cells clustered around the body and it's wake. Analysis and refinement of the unstructured grids proved successful at removing the grid dependent flow field but still showed no evidence of the third high drag flow regime. Further, the bulk levels of drag in all cases was too high and the fully separated flow regime occurred too late in the slant surface angle sweep, coming at 40° instead of the 30° seen in the wind tunnel results. Further analysis of the flow field using highly refined mixed meshes showed no improvement in the drag or flow field prediction with the high drag flow field still not present. The use of higher order differencing schemes and anisotropic turbulence models reduced the drag levels considerably but not to the levels seen in the wind tunnel results. Comparison of the results from this work with the work of other authors is difficult for two reasons. Firstly, work on the specific body used in this thesis is sparse and, secondly, much of the work done by other authors was in conjunction with automotive manufacturers and details of the specific numerical methods employed are not available. The most important parallel conclusion from the work presented here and that of other authors is the inability of the CFD prediction to capture the change in flow mode as the angle of slant surface is increased. This failure can, in all probability, be attributed to the use of a steady-state CFD solution algorithm to capture the flow field around the body. A small possibility perhaps still exists that further grid refinement, very localised around the body, would help, but the detailed and careful predictions presented in this study make this highly unlikely. The most important piece of further work that could follow this work would therefore be the application of a time-accurate (unsteady) CFD solution algorithm to the bluff body in ground proximity problem. Whether these predictions should be of an unsteady RANS nature, or full LES predictions would be best answered by applying these methods to the present flow problem which is fundamental to the study of automobile aerodynamics.