Fuel efficiency is very important when designing new vehicles. There is a continuous demand for lower fuel cost to customers. During operation, the amount of available energy is consumed by aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance. According to previous studies, it is estimated that the aerodynamic drag generated from the tire and rim assembly contributes to 25% of the vehicle aerodynamic drag. It is also believed that the tire geometric design has considerable influences on the aerodynamic performance of the tire. Many researchers have started to investigate the aerodynamics of tires. Since the experimental approaches are time consuming and costly, numerical methods have been developed to model the air flow around the tire. One of the challenges for modeling the tire is rotating boundary and contact patch. In the CFD model, both rotating and tire deformation have to be considered to get accurate predictions. But most of the current methods neglect the tire deformation and contact patch. For example, the most popular multiple reference frame approach cannot get accurate drag prediction when considering contact patch. Therefore, in this study, two modelling approaches are proposed and compared for the modelling of tire rotation. In the first approach, different rotating boundary methods are combined together. Different boundary conditions are used at different locations. These boundary conditions include moving wall, rotating wall, sliding mesh and multiple reference frame. This hybrid method can adapt to different geometric features of the tire. The second approach is a fluid structure interaction (FSI) method. In this approach, overset mesh technique is used. It is a nonconforming FSI method. Therefore, it is more efficient and can calculate the deformation of the tire. In this study, the two different approaches are conducted using the same tire geometry. The aerodynamic drag of the tire is used as the major indicate of the tire aerodynamic performance. The results have shown that the overset method can provide better performance in low loading conditions. But the tire deformation from overset mesh is not as accurate as a detailed finite element model. In the hybrid method, the tire deformation is imported from a finite element model. But the size of each of the domain with different boundary conditions has a considerable influence on the results. Further experiments are needed for detailed validation of the numerical results.


Investigation on the Modelling of Tire Rotating Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Division / Sponsors: 
Heat Transfer Division (HTD), Fluids Engineering Division (FED)

Heat Transfer Summer Conference
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/HT/HT2020/volume/83709

18th International Conference on Nanochannels, Microchannels, and Minichannels
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ICNMM/ICNMM2020/volume/83693

Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/FEDSM/FEDSM2020/volume/83716

HT-ICNMM2020 - Virtual Conference, SHTC - Virtual Conference, FEDSM2020 - Virtual Conference

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