Numerical Studies on Aerodynamics Performance of Modified Basebleed to Reduce Fuel Consumption in Squareback Cars

Abstract

In recent years, the utilization of SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicle) have attracted more in the automobile industry owing to their comfortness, efficient performance and practicality. Since the majority of SUVs are operated over the highway environment, the formation of undesirable aerodynamic drag forces severely affects the performance which leads to increase the fuel consumption. Hence, this paper more focuses to reduce the fuel consumption by introducing a modified basebleed method in the SUV car model. A numerical investigation is performed for SUV car models with modified basebleed and without basebleed for the constant operating speed to examine the aerodynamic parameters such as coefficient of pressure (CP), coefficient of drag (CD), coefficient of lift (CL) and coefficient of side force (CS) for the varying yaw angle (ψ). The k-ε turbulence model is utilized to predict the pressure field, velocity field and the formation of wake regions over the SUV car models with modified basebleed and without basebleed. The experimental testing is conducted using low speed subsonic wind tunnel to validate the numerical simulation results of car model for the varying velocity. Research witnessed that the fuel consumption rate is reduced to 4.02% for the SUV car model with modified basebleed than without basebleed, based on the reduction in coefficient of drag (CD). Eventually, the research suggests that implementing modified basebleed at the SUV car model reduces the fuel consumption and aerodynamically supports for better performance.

Keywords

• basebleed method
• drag reduction
• fuel consumption
• vehicle performance
• passenger car