Week 3 - External flow simulation over an Ahmed body.

Objectives:

• To define the Ahmed body and its importance.
• To Simulate flow over the Ahmed body.
• To perform the grid dependency test and post process the results

Describe Ahmed's body and its importance.

The Ahmed body is a simplified car body used in the automotive field to study the impact of the flow pattern on the drag. The external aerodynamics of the car defines many major traits of an automobile like stability, comfort, and fuel consumption at high speeds. The flow around the vehicle is characterized by high turbulent and three-dimensional flow separations as well as there is a growing need for more insight into the physical features of these dynamical flows. The Ahmed Body is a simplified car, used in the automotive field to investigate the flow analysis and find the wake flow around the body. Ahmed body is made up of a round front part, a moveable z slant plane in the rear of the body to study the detachment phenomena at different angles, and a rectangular box which link the front part and the rear slant plane. The principal objective to study such a simplified car body is to tackle the flow processes involved in drag production. Through perceiving the mechanisms involved in creating drag one can be able to design a car to minimize drag and therefore reducing fuel consumption and maximize vehicle performance.

Important of Ahmed body:

An Ahmed body represents a simplified vehicle volume which helps understand the fundamental physics defining by the engineers the lift and drag forces and coefficients at certain characteristically velocities, pressure differences and seeing and analyzing the vortices, turbulence, and Reynolds number obtained. ANSYS is a general-purpose FEA and CFD simulation software. It gives a numerical prediction of the behavior of a system.

These numerical predictions need to be validated by experimental data. People working in vehicle aerodynamics use Ahmed body to validate their numerical model because the experimental data from wind tunnel testing is available for Ahmed body. Once the numerical model invalidated, it is used to design new models of the car.

Its shape is simple enough to allow for accurate flow simulation but retains some important practical features relevant to automobile bodies. This model describes how to calculate the turbulent flow field around a simple car-like geometry using the Turbulent Flow, k-epsilon and k-omega interface. Later, either experimentally or computationally it can be recreated all the same but with the desired geometry, new to come up to the market or research.

The Ahmed body was described originally by S. R. Ahmed in 1984 [1]. Three main features were seen in the wake:

1. The A recirculation region that is formed as the flow separates at the top of the vertical back surface of the model
2. The B recirculation region that is formed due to the separation at the base of the model.
3. The c-pillar vortices that form as the vorticity in the side boundary layers roll up over the slant edges.

The wake was shown to be highly dependent on slant angle. For slant angles less than 12°, the flow remains attached over the slant. The flow is essentially two-dimensional and has low drag. Between 12° and 30°, the flow becomes much more three-dimensional as the c-pillar vortices form. These reach maximum strength at 30°. The drag increases significantly as the low-pressure cores act on the rear surfaces. Past 30° the flow separates fully off the slant. This results in a sudden decrease in drag and weaker c-pillar vortices.

Reason for negative pressure in the wake region:

The path lines showing the exact circular motion or vorticity generation just at the rear end of the car. The separation takes two regions of distribution. One at the upper part of the rear and the other at the lower part of the rear end.

The path lines show about the nature of the fluid interaction with the rear end of the Ahmed body which here shows that the fluid just after leaving the contact from the slope still possess the momentum in it and the fluid particles near to the surface almost show the no-slip region which means the very least possible velocity of the fluid particles is in contact with the slope and base of the rear part. Thus the fluid particles away from the rear region having the higher pressure beside the wake region try to approach from the higher pressure region to the lower pressure region thus creating a circularity exactly in the wake region created.

The body penetrating the fluid creates a region of emptiness just beside its end due to the nature of the geometry of the body here which can be seen least in case of a perfectly streamlined shaped body. This emptiness created is a low-pressure region towards which the fluid column exactly behind the wake region which of atmospheric pressure tries to fill the space thus dragging the fluid column with it thus creating the region of vorticity. This also results in the huge pressure gradient in the region exactly rear of the body creating the –ve pressure at the end. Also, this is the layman’s reason why there is negative gauge pressure in the wake region.

Significance of the point of separation:

The fluid separation point can be defined as a point where the dv/dy i.e. gradient of velocity goes zero along with the dp/dx = 0, for the specific point. In more simplified term we can say that the point where the velocity gradient goes zero and the pressure gradient along the x- direction goes zero the point of separations starts occurring or the negative pressure gradient starts forming after that point. The point of separation cannot be understood just by single contour in hard and fast way. It can be supportively studied with the help of the dp/dx plots or velocity plots w.r.t the Y direction and other such plots in which we can see the nature of such physical properties like dp/dx=0, and dv/dy=0 experiencing in a particular region of fluid and body interaction.

geometry

ahmed body in enclosure (not refined )

base mesh simulation

mesh details

setting up the physics

material selection

inlet

outlet

intilazion method is done using hybrid intilization

results :-

scalar residuals :-

velocity contour(non refined mesh base line mesh ) :-

pressure distribution over ahmed body

vector plot

geometry used for refined case :-

refined mesh

meshing details

body sizing for second enclosure

ahmed body meshing details

In this refined case we have used same setup condition and used in base line condition

result for refined condition :-

scalar residulas :-

co-efficent drag for refined mesh

pressure distribution on ahmed body refined

velocity contour after refined

pressure contour after refined

vector didtribution over a body after refined

velocity plot

conclustion :-

• As the setup is refined drag coefficient, lift coefficient decreases.
• The negative pressure in the wake region is primarily because there is no flow in that region. This can be further attributed to various factors such as separation and recirculation which is evident from the vector plot near the wake region.
• The point of separation occurs at the rear end of the vehicle, the separation occurs beyond this point where it can be observed that the flow recirculates and attaches it to the boundary layer.