The influence of wheel-housing shape on vehicle aerodynamic performance

Despite intense research into the flow around a road vehicle, the drag coefficient has plateaued at about 0.3 and further reductions will come from wheel associated areas. The wheel housings have had relatively little attention despite contributing significant disturbances to the airflow. A simple two wheeled body was developed to reproduce wheel effects of a typical passenger car. Benchmarking experiments were performed in a wind tunnel using a double-symmetry testing concept. CFD techniques were used for parametric study. A number of parameters were analysed and the flow structures indicate that wheel-housing shape has a significant influence on the vehicle aerodynamics.