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The effect of passive base ventilation on the aerodynamic drag of a generic SUV vehicle

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posted on 2017-09-01, 10:21 authored by Max Varney, Martin Passmore, Adrian P. Gaylard
Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) typically have a blunt rear end shape (for design and practicality), however this is not beneficial for aerodynamic drag. Drag can be reduced by a number of passive and active methods such as tapering and blowing into the base. In an effort to combine these effects and to reduce the drag of a visually square geometry slots have been introduced in the upper side and roof trailing edges of a squareback geometry, to take air from the freestream and passively injects it into the base of the vehicle to effectively create a tapered body. This investigation has been conducted in the Loughborough University’s Large Wind Tunnel with the ¼ scale generic SUV model. The basic aerodynamic effect of a range of body tapers and straight slots have been assessed for 0° yaw. This includes force and pressure measurements for most configurations. The slots generate useful, but small, drag reductions with the best configurations giving reductions in drag coefficient (Cd) of approximately 0.01, whereas the best taper configurations reduce Cd by close to 0.035. The slots also have a tendency to modify the lift.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Published in

SAE International Journal of Passenger Cars - Mechanical Systems

Volume

10

Issue

1

Pages

345 - 357

Citation

VARNEY, M., PASSMORE, M.A. and GAYLARD, A.P., 2017. The effect of passive base ventilation on the aerodynamic drag of a generic SUV vehicle. SAE International Journal of Passenger Cars - Mechanical Systems, 10 (1), pp. 345-357.

Publisher

© SAE International

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-01-31

Publication date

2017-03-28

Copyright date

2017

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal SAE International Journal of Passenger Cars - Mechanical Systems and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.4271/2017-01-1548.

ISSN

1946-4002

Language

  • en

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