Investigation of relationship between drag and lift

coefficients for a generic car model

Ivan Dobrev, Fawaz Massouh

To cite this version:

Ivan Dobrev, Fawaz Massouh. Investigation of relationship between drag and lift coefficients for a
generic car model. BULTRANS-2014, Sep 2014, Sozopol, Bulgaria. pp.171-174. �hal-01082895�

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Ivan DOBREV, Fawaz MASSOUH - Investigation of relationship between drag and lift coefficients
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 INVESTIGATION OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DRAG AND LIFT COEFFICIENTS FOR A
GENERIC CAR MODEL

IVAN DOBREV FAWAZ MASSOUH

Laboratoire de mécaniques des fluides, ENSAM, Paris, France Laboratoire de mécaniques des fluides, ENSAM, Paris, France
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract:

The paper presents a study of aerodynamic characteristics of a car, which has the simplified geometric shape, so-
called Ahmed body. Flow around the body and the influence of its rear slant angle on drag are widely studied by
numerous researchers. However, small number of studies treats the relationship between drag and lift and this
phenomenon is not fully understood. To clarify the relationship between lift and drag, experiments are conducted in the
wind tunnel of ENSAM - Paris. The study is carried out for different rear slant angles in order to determine how the drag
coefficient varies with lift. The results of experiments are completed by numerical simulations, which permit to obtain
the detailed flow field around Ahmed body and to understand better the effect of rear slant angle on drag and lift
coefficients.

Keywords: aerodynamics, helicopters, rotor wake.

body and found four horseshoe systems, which

1. Introduction existence and strength depend on the slant angle,
The aerodynamics of road vehicle is object of [1, 2]. Unfortunately, the information about the lift
numerous experimental study and simulations because coefficients is not presented. There are increasing
the aerodynamic forces are important factor for fuel number of papers, which studies the Ahmed body but
saving and vehicle stability. Generally, the industrial few are interested in the influence of lift on lift on
research is carried out on real scale vehicle because the drag, [3-9]. In these papers, the authors present
Reynolds number. However, in their study the simultaneously the lift and drag coefficients usually
researchers used the simplified geometry models, for slant angle of 25°. Therefore, it is interesting to
which permit to show the influence of the general show how the lift and drag coefficients vary for slant
form of the vehicle on aerodynamic characteristic. angles from 0° to 90°.
There exist several geometric forms, but the most The main purpose of this paper is to elucidate the
studied model of generic car is proposed in ref. [1] by influence of lift on drag when the slant angle varies.
Ahmed. This is a so-called Ahmed body, which is a The study is carried out experimentally and by means
very simple bluff body composed by three parts: front of numerical simulation. The obtained results will be
end, central part and rear end, fig 1. The authors [1] helpful for the drag reduction and for simulation
measure the total drag and separately the drag of front validation.
end, slanted rear end and vertical rear end base. The
2. Experimental setup
obtained results show that drag depends dramatically
on the slant angle of the rear end. The study is carried The experiments are carried out in the wind tunnel
out for 10 different slant angles, from 0° to 40°. The of ENSAM-Paris, fig. 1. This wind tunnel is of a
minimum of the drag is found to be at 12.5°, the closed-circuit type and has a three-blade axial fan with
maximum is reached at 30°, and then abruptly drops a rotor diameter of 3 m. The fan is driven by a
for high angles, where the flow is detaches. frequency-controlled asynchronous motor with a
Additionally, the authors study the wake behind the power of 120 kW. The flow is homogenized in a
settling chamber, which is equipped with honeycomb system HBM MGCPlus, which is equipped with high
strengtheners and wire mesh. The tunnel nozzle quality strain gauges amplifiers and analog to digital
accelerates the wind from settling chamber to test converters. The acquisition system is connected with
section up to 40 m/s. The nozzle has contraction ratio PC and controlled by a Labview program.
of 12.5, ensuring a uniform velocity profile with a In this study, we use Ahmed body presented in fig.
turbulence ratio of less than 0.25%. The semi-guided 3, which is smaller than the original. Because the
test section has a cross-section of 1.35 m × 1.65 m and length of the wind tunnel test section is limited, the
a length of 2 m. The static pressure in the test section scale factor is 3/4. In order to avoid the influence the
is equal to atmospheric pressure. Hence, the upstream wind tunnel boundary layer, the model is laid on
velocity only depends on the stagnation pressure in the special ground plate with a diameter of 1.5m,.
settling chamber, which is measured by a pressure The Ahmed body is installed on the 4-components
transducer (Furness Control FC20). balance for measurements of drag and lift forces.
Depending on slant angle, from 25° up to 90°, the flow
becomes highly unsteady and aerodynamic force on
the body vary with time. The flow visualization with
of helium-filled bubbles in the case of 90° shows a
strong detachment, fig. 4.

Fig. 1 Wind tunnel test section with Ahmed body

The wind tunnel is equipped with two balances that

are linked one to another, fig 2. The first balance is a
six-componenst and can measure up to 1500N with a
precision of 0.075N. The balance is equipped with
special cantilever beam, which measures the
components of the force and moment vectors
separately. The second balance can measure four
components: lift, drag, pitch and roll. This balance has
a precision of 0.01N in the interval of 0N to 50N.

Fig.3 Ahmed body

Fig.4 Flow detachment for 90° slant angle (ENSAM

wind tunnel)

To obtain the average value, the measurements are

Fig. 2 Wind tunnel balance conducted during a time interval of 180s with
sampling rating of 10Hz. The experiments show that
The balances are connected to a data acquisition the time interval longer than 180s do not changes the
results. The lift CL and drag CD coefficients are
calculated as follows: result the bottom pressure becomes smaller than top
FZ FX pressure.
CL = ; CD = (1) The results of this study show the strong
rV 2 rV 2 dependence of the drag from lift. However, this
S S
2 2 dependence is not easy to explain and quantify, as in
Here r is air density, V is upstream velocity and S is the case of the wing, because the aspect ratio of
cross section of Ahmed body. Ahmed body is very low and the body is very close to
the ground.

3 Experimental results
4. Numerical Simulation
All experiments are carried out for upstream
velocity of 30 m/s, therefore the Reynolds number is The flow around the Ahmed body is still difficult
2.66 times smaller than the Reynolds number in study to calculate [10]. In presented study, the numerical
presented in [1]. For this condition, the drag solution is carried out by means of CFD Ansys Fluent
coefficient becomes greater as is mentioned in [3, 9]. 15.0. The multi-block structured grid, which is created
The obtained results for lift and drag coefficients are with Gambit 2.4.2, contains more than 280 blocks.
presented on fig. 5 for 11 slant angles of 0°, 10°, 15°, After importing in Fluent, the grid is adapted two
20°, 25°, 27°, 28°, 29°, 30°, 45° and 90°. times consecutively near the wall boundary. As results
The study confirms the previously published the body surface contains more than 3 million
results for the drag, [3]. The minimum of the drag is elements, which permits to obtain dimensionless wall
reached for slant angle of 15°, when the lift is zero. distance y+ lower than 2. In total, the grid contains 45
The maximum of lift is for slant angle of 29° and for million hexahedral cells.
this angle, the drag reaches its maximum value. It must
be noted that the increasing of slant angle, from 25° to
29°, leads to increasing of the drag with 30%. When
the slant angle becomes 30°, the flow detaches from
rear-end and as results the lift force becomes smaller.
In this case, the drag is close to the drag for other slant
angles when the flow detachment occurs.

Fig.6 Pressure distribution for slant angle of 25°.

The calculation is unsteady with time step of 0.01s.

The boundary conditions correspond to the
experiment. The turbulence model is hybrid -
Improved Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation
(IDDES). This kind of modeling improves
significantly the results in the case of flow separation,
but is very time consuming and needs one-week
calculation on computer with 2x8 cores.

Fig.5 Lift and drag coefficient of Ahmed body depending

on slant angle

The variation of the lift with increasing of slant

angle is linear from 0° to 29°. When the flow detaches
from the slanted surface, the lift and the drag varies
insignificantly. The lift is negative, because the flow
between the ground plate and the body accelerates, as Fig.7 Velocity distribution for slant angle of 25°.
 The calculations are conducted for slant angles of understand better the effect of rear slant angle on drag
25° and 90°. The result for pressure distribution on the and lift coefficients. The simulations are in good
Ahmed body surface is presented in fig. 6. The agreement with experiments but need detailed
velocity and vorticity distribution on the symmetry comparison with results from particle image
plane is presented in fig. 7 and 8. For slant angle of velocimetry.
25°, the flow becomes highly unsteady and the drag
force varies significantly with time. However, the flow References
is not separated from the slanted surface, but it
[1] S. R. Ahmed, G. Ramm and G. Faltin, Some salient
becomes very turbulent. The drag and lift are averaged
features of the time-averaged ground vehicle wake (No.
from 20s time steps. The results are presented in tab. 1 840300). SAE Technical Paper, 1984
and shows good agreement with experiment.
[2] W. H. Hucho, Aerodynamics of road vehicle, SAE Inc,
Warrendale, Pa., 4 ed, 1998.
[3] Graysmith, A. J., et al, Comparisons between CFD and
experimental results for the Ahmed reference model, RAeS
Conference on Vehicle Aerodynamics, 1994.
[4] R. K. Strachan , K. Knowles and N. J. Lawson. "The
vortex structure behind an Ahmed reference model in the
presence of a moving ground plane." Experiments in fluids
vol 42(5), 2007, pp.659-669.
[5] J. F. Beaudoin, J. L. Aider, Drag and lift reduction of a
Fig.8 Vorticity distribution for slant angle of 25°. 3D bluff body using flaps, Experiments in fluids, vol.44(4),
2008, pp. 491-501.

Tab. 1 [6] R. K. Strachan, N.J. Lawson, N. J. and M. V. Finnis,

Force and moment measurements for a generic car model in
Coefficient Experiment CFD proximity to a side wall, Proceedings of the Institution of
CL 0.224 0.241 Mechanical Engineers, Part D: Journal of automobile
engineering, 2012.
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[7] G. Fourrié, L. Keirsbulck, L., Labraga, and P. Gilliéron,
Bluff-body drag reduction using a deflector, Experiments in
Fluids, 50(2), 2011, pp. 385-395.
5. Conclusion [8] A. Thacker, S. Aubrun, A. Leroy, and P. Devinant,
Effects of suppressing the 3D separation on the rear slant on
The paper presents a study of Ahmed body for 11
the flow structures around an Ahmed body. Journal of Wind
different slant angles. The flow around the body, the Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, 107, 2012, pp.
lift and the drag significantly depends on slant angle. 237-243.
From 0° up to 29° the lift growth is linear, from
negative to positive value. For slant angles of 30° the [9] H. Fukuda, K. Yanagimoto, H. China, and K. Nakagawa,
Improvement of vehicle aerodynamics by wake control,
flow separates and the lift becomes again negative.
JSAE review, 16(2), 1995, pp.151-155.
Beyond the slant angle of 30°, the lift and drag become
nearly constant. The drag has a minimum at 15°, when [10] W. Meile, G. Brenn, A. Reppenhagen, and A. Fuchs,
the lift is close to zero and then becomes 50% greater Experiments and numerical simulations on the aerodynamics
for 29° when the lift reaches its maximum. of the Ahmed body, CFD Letters, 3(1), 2011, pp. 32-39.
The results of experiments are completed by
numerical simulations, which permit to obtain the
detailed flow field around Ahmed body and to