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Procedia Engineering 90 (2014) 308 – 313

10th International Conference on Mechanical Engineering, ICME 2013

Numerical Study on Aerodynamic Drag Reduction of Racing Cars

S.M. Rakibul Hassan*, Toukir Islam, Mohammad Ali, Md. Quamrul Islam
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka-1000, Bangladesh

Abstract

Aerodynamic drag is one of the main obstacles to accelerate a solid body when it moves in the air. When a racing car or road
vehicle burns fuel to accelerate, drag force pulls it from back to reduce the speed and hence the fuel efficiency is adversely
affected. About 50 to 60% of total fuel energy is lost only to overcome this adverse aerodynamic force. To win a race, which may
be decided by fraction of second, the racing cars need a faster acceleration, which is possible by reducing the drag force by
optimizing its shape to ensure stream-lining or reducing the separation. Reduction of aerodynamic drag has become one of the
prime concerns in vehicle aerodynamics. This article is concentrated on different aspects analysis of aerodynamic drag of racing
cars and different drag reduction techniques such as rear under body modification and exhaust gas redirection towards the rear
separation zones. Through a numerical process (Finite Volume Method) of solving the Favre-averaged Navier-Stokes equations
backed by k–epsilon turbulence model, the drag coefficient of the car under analysis is found to be 0.3233 and it is evident that
the drag can be reduced up to 22.13% by different rear under-body modifications and up to 9.5% by exhaust gas redirection
towards the separated region at the rear of the car. It is also evident that if somehow the negative pressure area and its intensity at
the rear of the car can be minimized, the separation pressure drag is subsequently reduced.
© 2014
© 2014The The Authors.
Authors. Published
Published by Elsevier
by Elsevier Ltd.
Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bangladesh University of
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering
Engineering and Technology (BUET).
and Technology (BUET)

Key Words: Aerodynamic drag; separation; coefficient of drag; under-body diffuser; exhausts gas redirection.

1. Introduction

Aerodynamic drag of racing cars has probably received highest attention over last five decades in
experimentaland practical field of fluid dynamics. Many researchers and authors have described different forms of

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +8801920795748

E-mail address:[email protected]

1877-7058 © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering
and Technology (BUET)
doi:10.1016/j.proeng.2014.11.854
 S.M. Rakibul Hassan et al. / Procedia Engineering 90 (2014) 308 – 313 309

drag, possible reasons behind them and several ways of minimizing the drag. Katz’s [1] work was fully devoted for
the racing car aerodynamics and he described the different aspect of car design or streamlining starting from the first
generation automobiles to most recent models, but no numerical or experimental procedure was explained to
measure the drag. Computational analysis to reduce the drag is performed by Barbut et al. [2], Rouméas et al. [3] on
road vehicle and by Guilmineau [4] on the simplified car body (Ahmed body). Islam and Mamun [5] performed
numerical and experimental study to measure the aerodynamic drag, but their work was concentrated on sedan car
only and they did not investigated any drag reduction technique. Aerodynamics of sedan cars and racing cars are
different in many aspects like speed and effects of body constructions. Koikeet al. [6] introduced vortex generators
to reduce the drag of racing cars. But effectiveness of vortex generator is restricted by the body shape of the car.
Work of Krishnani [7] is not only very informative about the sport utility car, but also for drag reduction techniques.
But this work does not concern with racing cars specifically.Adem [8] worked on vehicle aerodynamics and
described the aspects of aerodynamic drag, but his work was subjected to a pick-up truck.Work of Damjanović et al.
[9] is one of the recent studies on race car aerodynamic drag that includes both two dimensional and three
dimensional analyses. But they only described the reduction of drag by using spoiler. Islam et al. [10] worked on
calculating the drag force of racing car. A comparative drag analysis of sedan and square back car is performed by
Bijlani et al. [11] and found that sedan car produces less drag than square-back car. A very few research paper has
clear indication about the specific area that has to be used in drag calculation as different drag force is subjected to
different area.In this work, numerical simulations are performed to analyse the drag of a racing car and some
procedures to reduce it by reducing the flow separation.

2. Numerical Method

Favre-averaged Navier-Stokes equations are used here, where time-averaged effects of the flow turbulence on the
flow parameters are considered. Flow simulation employs transport equations for the turbulent kinetic energy and its
dissipation rate, the so-called k-ε model. Flow simulation employs one system of equations to describe both laminar
and turbulent flows and transition from a laminar to turbulent state or vice versa is possible. The set of equations for
Newtonian fluids are:

Here is the Kronecker delta, h is the thermal enthalpy, is the dynamic viscosity coefficient, is the turbulent
eddy viscosity coefficient and k is the turbulent kinetic energy. Point to be noted that both k and
d are zero for
laminar flow.In the frame of k- turbulence model, . Here is the turbulent viscosity factor; defined
as,

; where, and
d

Here y is the distance from the wall. This function of allows us to take into account laminar-turbulent
transition. Two additional transport equations are used to describe the turbulent kinetic energy and dissipation at
steady state,
310 S.M. Rakibul Hassan et al. / Procedia Engineering 90 (2014) 308 – 313

+
Here, , ,

Now for these equations is unity when and zero otherwise. , , ,

=1.92, , . These values are found empirically. These equations describe both laminar and
turbulent flow.The cell-centred finite volume (FV) method is used to obtain conservative approximations of the
governing equations on the locally refined rectangular mesh. The governing equations are integrated over a control
volume which is a grid cell, and then approximated with the cell-centred values of the basic variables. The integral
conservation laws may be represented in the form of the cell volume and surface integral equation:

are replaced by the discrete form . The second-order upwind approximations of

fluxes F are based on the implicitly treated modified Leonard's QUICK approximations [12] and the Total Variation
Diminishing (TVD) method [13].The size of computational domain is (length×height×width) 17.85295626 m ×
3.988927894 m × 6.01184566m.Length of the car is 4.434m and the gap between the road and the car =
0.10702837178m. Number of grid used in computation is 109,543.

3. Result and Discussion

3.1. Effect of Velocity on Drag Force

Drag force is the result of the pressure difference between the front and the rear of the car. As the velocity of car
increases, the stagnation pressure increases as shown in Fig. 1(a) and at the same time the pressure at rear decreases
too due to the increase in momentum of air. So the difference between the pressure at stagnation or front and the
pressure at rear of the car increases as the velocity and hence Reynolds no. increases. The relation between the drag
force and Reynolds no. is as Fig.1(b). At the free stream velocity 50 m/s, the coefficient of drag CDis found to be
0.3233. Further analysis for drag reductions are done regarding this as a base value and compared the relative
reduction of drag.

(a) (b)
Fig. 1. (a) Force at stagnation points for different free stream velocity. (b) Drag force at different Reynolds Number.
 S.M. Rakibul Hassan et al. / Procedia Engineering 90 (2014) 308 – 313 311

Fig. 2. (a) Rear under-body slicing at angle β degree. (b) Rear body diffuser

3.2. Drag Reduction

3.2.1. Rear Underbody Modification

When a car moves forward, a low pressure zone is created behind the car. This low pressure zone pulls the car
from behind opposite to its moving direction and creates pressure drag. This low pressure zone is created due to the
separation of flow and consequent vortices are generated at the back of the car. To reduce this pulling-back effect, a
unique idea is to slice the rear under-body at certain angles as shown in Fig. 2(a) which actually directs some flow
from the under-body to the low pressure zone. This reduces the effect of vortices and low pressure effect. Another
popular way to reduce the rear end separation is to use under-body diffuser as shown in Fig. 2(b) which also adds
elegance in aesthetics of the car, but it has less flow area as the rear under-body is not fully sliced out. So less
reduction of drag is experienced then similar degree of rear under-body slicing. In Fig.3 a pressure cut plot for base
of the car at 50 m/s free steam velocity shows a certain envelope of pressure range of 100800 Pa to 102000 Pa.
Another small envelope inside this envelop for β=0, shows further pressure reduction in the ranges of 100700 Pa to
100799 Pa.With the increase of slicing angle β, the low pressure area decreases and the coefficient of drag decreases
too.

Table 1. For rear under-body modification, drag reduction at flow velocity 50 m/s

modifications Descriptions of modifications CD ΔCD % of reduction of CD

None - 0.3233 - -
Modification1 β =2.5°, rear under-body sliced 0.3083 0.01500 4.639
Modification2 β =5.0°, rear under-body sliced 0.2962 0.02707 8.373
Modification3 β =10.0°, rear under-body sliced 0.2694 0.05386 16.58
Modification4 β =12.5°, rear under-body sliced 0.2517 0.07156 22.13
Modification5 β =12.5°, under-body diffuser 0.2926 0.03070 9.5
312 S.M. Rakibul Hassan et al. / Procedia Engineering 90 (2014) 308 – 313

Fig.3. Pressure contour at the rear end (base) of car at different β, showing reduction of low pressure zone (green) with increasing β.

Fig. 4.Change in Cd due to different modification. Fig. 5. Change in Cd with exhaust gas velocity

As the slicing angle increases in case of under body slicing, more air is permitted to flow to the low pressure
region. As a result the size of low pressure zone is reduced as shown in Fig. 3 which indicates the increase in
pressure at that region. So normal force along x axis i.e. the drag force decreases and hence the Cd decreases too.
From Fig.4it can be seen that Cd decreases almost linearly with the increase in slicing angle. For under body
diffuser, though the drag force decreases, the reduction is not as high as that for same degree of under body slicing.
The difference is shown for β = 12.50in Fig. 4.

3.2.2. Exhaust Gas Redirection

Another way of reducing drag is using the exhaust gas to fill the low pressure zone behind the car. The exhaust
gas can be flown from the exhaust pipe outlet at different speed. The flow is directed towards the low pressure zone
behind the car so that it can reduce the negative pressure i.e. increase the pressure to reduce drag force.

Table 2: Change in Cd with exhaust gas velocity.

Item No mod. Mod. 1 Mod. 2 Mod. 3 Mod. 4 Mod. 5

Exhaust - 80 50 40 30 20
Velocity(m/s)
Cd 0.3200 0.3202 0.3177 0.3155 0.3142 0.3104
 S.M. Rakibul Hassan et al. / Procedia Engineering 90 (2014) 308 – 313 313

Fig.6. Pressure contour at the rare of the car at exhaust velocity (a) 20m/s (b) 30 m/s (c) 40 m/s (d) 50 m/s (e) 80 m/s

Though the reduction in drag is very small as observed in table 2, in case of racing car this ‘very small’ drag
reduction can be decisive between the winner and loser. The exhaust gas is the combination of carbon dioxide,
steam, and Nitrogen. Concentrations of these gasses are used in simulation according to their volumetric fraction in
case of stoichiometric reaction. Pressure, Temperature and angle of emission of exhaust gas that have been used in
simulation are 2atm, 3000C and 450 respectively.
Here in Fig. 5 it can be seen that the value of coefficient of drag decreases as the speed of exhaust gas decreases.
Reason behind this is at higher velocity, exhaust gas induce the surrounding air to create a lower pressure, which
elongate or enlarge the low pressure zone or reduce the pressure again and increase the drag. This can be seen from
the pressure contour in Fig. 6.

4. Conclusion

Flow separation is responsible for the major portion of aerodynamic drag of racing cars. The aerodynamic drag
coefficient of the car model used here is found to be 0.3233. The main design consideration to reduce the drag of
any bluff should be- keep the flow attached to the body as much as possible. That means maintaining streamline
shape, reducing surface roughness, fewer joints of the body or avoiding sharp fillets, controlling lift force, air or
exhaust gas flow towards the low pressure zone at the rear portion of the car etc. These must be considered while
designing a car for higher speed and acceleration as well as for better fuel efficiency and control. Aerodynamic drag
reduction by rear under body modification results in up to 22.13% and rear under-body diffuser results 9.5%
reduction of drag coefficient. Exhaust gas redirecting towards the low pressure zone at the rear of the car is proved
to be effective tosome extent, which paves the way of future improvement for future researchers. About 3.3% drag
coefficient can be reduced by this procedure considering the ideal exhaust gas composition.

References

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