Optimizing vehicle aerodynamics for rain water management

Guest speaker: Daimler

Identifying and understanding how a car interacts with water is key for maximizing critical attributes like safety, reliability and quality. In that context, the analysis on how external aerodynamics design impacts window clarity during inclement weather is a key concern for engineers, as it becomes stressful and dangerous to the driver when water impairs vision to side view mirrors, and even on the front/rear windshield. Aerodynamicists need to be able to look at the trade-off in the design between styling, to impact on noise, drag, and clarity of the side view mirror to come up with the best design. To accelerate design validation, the use of CFD simulation and digital twins is decisive early in the design phase to limit costly re-design once a prototype is built. This enables new innovative ideas on water/acoustics to be applied before first physical prototype has been built helping OEM’s reduce costs and time to market.

This webinar will focus on the interaction between rain water and external aerodynamic design of the vehicle. Our guest speaker Michael Ade from Daimler will introduce the challenges of water management simulation, and present how to directly model typical considerations with a complete 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) process that accounts for multi-phase flows such as liquid films, sprays and deposition.

Our industry experts will introduce how the external water management can be simulated on a real car including challenging details like the moving wiper. Existing multiphase models in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ are used, tailored and improved in connection with test facilities to describe all the relevant phenomena. The presentation will show the actual possibilities and address further chances of improvements on the existing models to predict the behavior of water exposed to the aerodynamic flow around a real car.