A NUMERICAL STUDY ON THE EFFECT OF VEHICLE-TO-VEHICLE DISTANCE ON THE AERODYNAMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF A MOVING VEHICLE

Aerodynamic design of a vehicle has very important meaning on the fuel economy, dynamic stability and the noise & vibration of a moving vehicle. In this study, the correlation of aerodynamic effect between two model vehicles moving inline on a road was studied with the basic SAE model vehicle. Drag and lift are two main physical forces acting on the vehicle and both of them directly effect on the fuel economy and driving stability of the vehicle. For the research, the distance between two vehicles is varied from 5m to 30m at the fixed vehicle speed, 100km/h and the side-wind was assumed to be zero. The main issue for this numerical research is on the understanding of the interaction forces; lift and drag between two vehicles formed inline. From the study, it was found that as the distance between two vehicles is closer, the drag force acting on both the front and rear vehicle decreases and the lift force has same trend for both vehicle. As the distance(D) is 5m, the drag of the front vehicle reduced 7.4% but 28.5% for the rear-side vehicle. As the distance is 30m, the drag of the rear vehicle is still reduced to 22% compared to the single driving.