PROPOSAL OF AN AERODYNAMIC CONCEPT FOR AUTOMOTIVE DRAG REDUCTION

Renan Francisco Soares¹; Francisco José de Souza¹

¹ Universidade Federal de Uberlândia

Resumo

The automotive industry pursues to decrease the fuel consumption of road cars. As the Brazilian government, many countries around the world incentives the industry to achieve such reduction. The purpose of this paper is an aerodynamic concept for drag reduction. To represent a car model, the DrivAer Fastback two-dimensional profile has been adopted as baseline. The injection and suction of momentum by a jet applied on the car rear are investigated by means of CFD. From the quantitative point of view, the suction jet on rear car profile does not seem to be a way to yield drag reduction. The injection jet at higher speed points to smaller global drag than baseline profile. Despite this positive first conclusion, the correction of drag results (removing the jet momentum from the global drag) points to higher drag of profile car than the baseline car in all three cases. On the other hand, the results from the injection of momentum at lower speed suggest a reasonable application as drag reduction system. Compared to the baseline car profile, momentum injection cases at all positions indicates drag reduction. In addition, the profile drag decreases as the jet position is higher at lower jet speed. Therefore, the main contributions of this paper is (a) to expose that the best drag reduction has been evidenced via injection at lower speed at higher rear car position, as well as (b) offering to automotive engineering an aerodynamic concept to improve drag reduction of road cars.

Palavras-chave: Aerodynamics Concept; Automotive; DrivAer; Passive System; Injection