Experimental and Computational Investigation of Drag Co-Efficient of a Commercial Car Model

It is essential that aerodynamics can be taken in to account during the design of cars as an improved aerodynamics in car would attain higher speeds and more fuel efficiency which leads to less fuel consumption and vehicle stability and reduces shortage of fuel. In this paper the external aerodynamics of a commercial car model was investigated numerically and validated the results experimentally with wind tunnel. The objective of the current work is to check the drag and lift co-efficient of model, as well as pressure distribution of the commercial car model in wind tunnel, second to develop virtual wind tunnel environment and conduct trials. In this paper 1:14 scale down car model is used and by applying reverse engineering concept CAD (Computer Aided Design) data is extracted from the scale down model for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis. ANSA and T-grid is used as pre-processor and Fluent as solver for CFD analysis.