PASSIVE CONTROL OF AERODYNAMIC DRAG OF A VEHICLE USING POROUS REARVIEW MIRRORS

Amélie Danlos (1) , Ivan Dobrev (2) , Renaud Zampatti (1) , Vincent Djaffardjee (1) , Fawaz Massouh (2)

1 CMGPCE - Laboratoire de Chimie moléculaire, génie des procédés chimiques et énergétiques
2 DynFluid - Laboratoire de Dynamique des Fluides

he study of the vehicle drag reduction is a new milestone for the advances in both fuel consumption and pollutant emission reduction. The effect of passive control of the vehicle drag cannot be negligible to reach new standards in the automotive pollution domain. One technique to act on the drag reduction is the optimization of the sideview mirrors. This study presents results obtained in the DynFluid Laboratory wind tunnel. The side-view mirror is assimilated to a half-sphere. A passive control method using porous medium is tested. Results for two porous halfsphere configurations are compared to a reference half-sphere. Melamine foam is placed in the equator of half-spheres with different thickness (2.5% and 10% of the diameter). For speeds ranging from 25 km/h to 115 km/h (ReD = 55,000 to ReD = 252,000 with D = 12 cm), a porous half-sphere is able to reduce the drag coefficient. This work aims to find the best conditions to maximize the drag reduction. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) measurements are presented to analyze the effect of the porous medium on the wake and on the boundary layer.

Mots clés: Drag reduction; Passive control; Side-view mirror; Bluff-body flow; Porous media; half-sphere; Particle Image Velocimetry

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Amélie Danlos, Ivan Dobrev, Renaud Zampatti, Vincent Djaffardjee, Fawaz Massouh. PASSIVE CONTROL OF AERODYNAMIC DRAG OF A VEHICLE USING POROUS REARVIEW MIRRORS. Scientific conference on aeronautics, automotive and railway engineering and technologies – BulTrans 2015, Technical University of Sofia Faculty of Transport, Sep 2015, Sozopol, Bulgaria. pp.108-112. ⟨hal-01498442⟩