MATEC Web of Conferences 220, 02001 (2018) https://doi.org/10.

1051/matecconf/201822002001
ICMSC 2018

Numerical Study on Aerodynamic Drag Reduction of an Urban-Concept

Car for Energy-Efficient Competition
1 2
Himsar Ambarita and Munawir R Siregar
1
Sustainable Energy Research Centre, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Kampus USU, Medan 20155, Indonesia
2
Sarulla Operation Ltd., The Energy Building 51st floor, SCBD Lot 11A, Jl. Jend. Sudirman Jakarta 12190, Indonesia

Abstract. The present work deals with aerodynamic drag reduction of an urban-concept car for energy-efficient
competition. Several modifications have been proposed to the original design of the urban-concept of the car. In order
to investigate the effect of the proposed modifications numerical method has been developed. In the numerical
method three-dimensional governing equations have been solved numerically. Turbulent flow is modeled using k-
epsilon model. The two designs have been simulated at five different inlet velocities. The inlet velocity varies from 10
m/s to 20 m/s. The velocity contour, velocity vector and pressure distributions have been plotted. The results show
that the proposed modifications improve the performance of the proposed design. At the given inlet velocities, the
aerodynamic drag coefficient of the new design decreased 26.63 % in comparison with original design. It is
recommended to modify the original design of the urban concept car by implementing the proposed modifications.
The new design will improve the performance of the urban concept car.

1 Introduction aerodynamics characteristics of "Merdeka 2" a prototype

of a solar vehicle that participated in the world solar
Shell Eco-marathon is a competition that challenges challenge [2]. The body of the car was designed based on
students around the world to design, build and drive the box fish which was also claimed the concept design of
most energy-efficient car. There are three annual events Mercedes Benz minivan. The turbulent governing
in Asia, Americas, and Europe. In each event, the student equations were solved numerically. Reynold-averaged
team takes to the track to examine who goes further with Navier-Stokes with the k-epsilon model were used to
the less amount of fuel [1]. The University of Sumatera model the turbulent flow. It was stated that the numerical
Utara (USU) participates in Shell Eco-marathons Asia and experimental results do not agree well. Krishnani [3]
every year. The student team of USU named as HORAS employed commercial code to examine the drag
team. The HORAS team also participates in Indonesian reduction of a generic sports utility vehicle. The study has
national level of similar competition known as National examined the effect of external devices like spoilers,
energy-efficient car contest (named as KMHE). The vortex strake device and under-carriage flow device on
Horas team consists of students from Mechanical reducing aerodynamic drag in a vehicle. Franck et al. [4]
Engineering of USU. The HORAS team has designed an investigated flow around the Ahmed Vehicle model using
urban concept car. In order to get the better performance numerical simulation with several turbulence models.
the urban concept car has been modified several times. Kim et al. [5] reported the examination on salient drag
Many modifications have been implemented to the car. reduction of a heavy vehicle using modified cab-roof
One of the important modification is the body of the car. fairings. The results are to provide useful information for
It is designed to meet the high aerodynamic performance the design of new cab-roof fairing models and the
in order to reduce fuel consumption. The better improvement of the aerodynamic performance of heavy
aerodynamic performance of the car is one of the solution vehicles, including trucks and tractor-trailers. Shim et al.
to produce an energy-efficient which can reduce the drag [6] reported the investigation on the optimization of
force of the body. Typically, 3-11% of energy from fuel bobsleigh bumper shape to reduce aerodynamic drag in a
is burnt to overcome the aerodynamic load. Thus, the vehicle. In order to solve the turbulent equations, k-
study on aerodynamic drag reduction will give significant omega shear stress transport turbulence model is used to
contribution to reducing fuel consumption. This is the close the three-dimensional Reynolds averaged Navier-
background of this study. Stokes equation. A parametric study was conducted using
Several studies on aerodynamic performance in a car six parameters related to the shape of the front and rear
habe been reported in literature. Taha et al. used bumpers and three parameters, i.e., the distance between
commercial numerical code of Fluent to investigate the bumpers and the ground and leading angle of the front

© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
MATEC Web of Conferences 220, 02001 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1051/matecconf/201822002001
ICMSC 2018

bumper as design parameters. The objective function for expected to supply necessary information for designing
optimization was the aerodynamic drag coefficient. The of an energy-efficient car
results showed that aerodynamic drag of the bobsleigh
was reduced by 3.08% in comparison with the reference
design. Lorite-Diez et al. [7] investigated the use of the 2 Method
adjoint sensitivity formulation to design efficient passive Numerical approach is used to solve the problem. The
control strategies intending at reducing the drag used governing equations are explained as follows.
coefficient of a slender blunt-based body with a straight Three-dimensional governing equations are used to solve
rear cavity. the fluid flow problem and the turbulence mode is
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code plays an employed to model the flow. The continuity equation and
important role to explore the fluid flow characteristics in momentum equation are formulated as follows.
order to design and to promote modification of a racecar.
Kieffer et al. [8] employed CFD to study the section  
characteristics of Formula Mazda race car wings. The    ui   0 (1)
t xi
commercial STAR-CD CFD code was used to perform
the simulation. The turbulent flow was modeled using k-
Dui p 
 ui u j 2 ui 
epsilon model. The results are presented graphically. It        ij 
Dt xi x j   x j xi 3 xi   (2)
was shown the pressure and velocity distributions and lift  

and drag coefficients for the different cases. The results
were claimed to be valuable for improving the optimum

x j

  uiu j 
handling of Formula Mazda race cars. Mariani et al. [9]
reported a study that aimed to improve the external fluid- The last term of the right side of equation (2) is
dynamics of the first prototype of the Formula-SAE known as the Reynolds-stresses tensor. It represents the
(Society of Automotive Engineers) race car of the transfer of momentum due to turbulent fluctuations. This
University of Perugia, Italy prepared for participation in tensor can be calculated using below equation.
the international competition of Varano (Parma-Italy).
Two prototypes were analyzed numerically; the original 
  vivj    vivj  vi v j  (3)
prototype and redesigning prototype. The results showed
that a remarkable improvement of the aerodynamics In this method, Boussinesq hypothesis is employed to
performance was obtained by the proposed modifications. relate the stresses with the mean velocity gradients. Using
Hassan et al. [10] reported an investigation on this assumption, the Reynolds-stresses can be calculated
aerodynamic drag reduction of racing cars by using a using the following equation.
numerical method. In the method, Favre-averaged
Navier-Stokes equations solved using k-epsilon  u u j 2 ui
  uiu j  t  i      k  t  ij (4)
turbulence model. Those equations were solved using  x j xi  3 xi 
  
Finite Volume Method. The results showed that the drag
coefficient of the car was 0.3233 and it was evident that The standard k   turbulence model is employed to
the drag can be reduced up to 22.13% by different rear
close the equation (4). The additional governing
under-body modifications and it can be up to 9.5% by
equations, turbulent kinetic energy ( k ) equation and the
exhaust gas redirection towards the separated region at
the rear of the car. Hetawal et al. [11] reported the turbulent dissipation rate (  ), are calculated as follows.
investigation on rear engine Formula SAE racecar. The
Dk 
 t k  (5)
objective was to investigate the aerodynamic         Gk  Gb    YM
characteristics of a SAE race car with a front spoiler, Dt xi   k  xi 
without the front spoiler, and with firewall vent. The
study was conducted by employing Fluent CFD software D 
 t   
        C1  Gk  C3 Gb 
with k-epsilon turbulence model. The results were Dt xi     xi  k (6)
graphically presented with drag coefficient and velocity  2
 C2 
contour. k
Recently, Ambarita et al. employed CFD to explore
the aerodynamic characteristics of an urban concept car The turbulent viscosity t is calculated by the below
for energy-efficient competition [12]. The aerodynamic equation.
characteristics of the urban concept car designed by
HORAS team has been investigated numerically. The k2
objective of the study was to explore the aerodynamics t   C (7)

characteritics. The results showed that the aerodynamic
drag of the car was high and even higher than a The coefficients Gk , Gk and YM represent the
commercial city car. It was suggested to further generation of turbulent kinetic energy due to mean
investigate several modifications in order to reduce the velocity gradient, generation of turbulent kinetic energy
aerodynamic drag. In this study, several modifications are due to buoyancy and the contribution of fluctuating
proposed. The effects of the modifications on the dilation in compressible turbulence to the overall
aerodynamic drag reduction are examined. The results are

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MATEC Web of Conferences 220, 02001 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1051/matecconf/201822002001
ICMSC 2018

dissipation rate, respectively. In addition, the parameter Boundary

Location Boundary condition
C1 , C2 , C3 and C are constants. While,  k and   mark
Plane
are the turbulent Prandtl numbers for k and  ,
respectively. f Bottom/road Wall
The governing equations were discretized upon three-
g Right side Pressure outlet (0 Pa)
dimensional computational domain. The used mesh,
computational domain, car position and the boundary As mentioned in the previous section, the objective of
conditions are shown in Figure 1. Here, only a half of the this study is to examine the effect of the propose
computational domain is taken into simulation. The modifications on the aerodynamic drag. The original
boundary conditions are explained in Table 1.Use A4 design and modified designs are shown in Figure 2. The
paper size (210 x 297 mm) and adjust the margins to fluid flow and aerodynamic drag of these two designs are
those shown in Table 1. The final printed area will be 172 investigated numerically using the explained method.
x 252 mm.

d
e

b
c
Symmetric

Side view Rear view

Figure 1. Computational Domain

The governing equations are discretized using second Figure 2. Original and Modified Designs
order upwind scheme. The system equations and
boundary conditions are solved iteratively using SIMPLE
algorithm. The aerodynamic performance will be
3 Results and Discussions
examined using drag coefficient ( CD ). The coefficient is The numerical simulations on the original and modified
formulated using the below equation. designs have been carried out at five different inlet
velocities. They are 10 m/s, 12.5 m/s, 15 m/s, 17.5 m/s
FD and 20 m/s. In the first section of the result the numerical
CD  (8)
1
2 V 2 AD method will be validated with Ahmed body. The
discussion will be followed by fluid flow characteristics
Where FD [N],  [kg/m3], V [m/s] and AD [m2] are drag and aerodynamic drag.
force, density, fluid inlet velocity and frontal area of drag Table 2. Result Comparisons
force.
Table 1. Boundary Conditions Experimental Simulation Present
Parameter
work [4] [4] Work
Boundary Drag Coef.
mark
Location Boundary condition 0.2300 0.2346 0.239034
Diff. [%] - 2.00% 3.93%
a Top domain Pressure outlet (0 Pa)

b Car surface Wall

Velocity inlet (varied from 10 to 3.1. Numerical Validation
c Inlet
20 m/s)
d Outlet domain Pressure outlet (0 Pa) The developed numerical method is firstly validated. The
present method has been used to calculate drag
e Symmetry Symmetry coefficient of Ahmed Body. The drag coefficient resulted

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MATEC Web of Conferences 220, 02001 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1051/matecconf/201822002001
ICMSC 2018

from experimental and numerical works are presented in Figure 4 shows the comparison of pressure contour on
Table 2. The results show that the the present numerical the surfaces of the two designs. Figure 4(a) shows that
method does agree well with previous works. The minimum and maximum pressure on the original design
discrepancy to the experimental work is only 3.93%. are -268 Pa and 126 Pa, respectively. The pressure
Thus, the present method will be used to investigate the difference is 394 Pa. On the other hand, the modified
effect of the modifications. design, shown in Figure 5(b), the minimum and
maximum pressures are -274.2 Pa and 113.3 Pa. Thus,
the pressure difference is 387.5 Pa. The pressure
3.2 Fluid flow characteristics
difference of the modified design is lower than the
Velocity contour and velocity vector in the rear area of original mode. This fact suggests that the proposed
the modified designs are shown in Figure 3(a) and 3(b), modification results in lower pressure difference on the
respectively. The velocity contour shows that the modified design.
magnitude of the velocity on the front area is minimum.
The maximum velocity is captured above the car. The 3.3 Drag coefficient
reversal flow is captured in the rear area of the car. Figure
3(b) clearly shows the reversal flow. The difference of The fluid flow characteristics are used to calculated the
the velocity between front and rear body related to drag aerodynamic drag coefficient of the original and modified
force. designs. Equation (8) is used to calculate the drag
coefficient. The calculations are made for five different
inlet velocities. Figure 5 shows the drag coefficients of
the original design and modified designs. It can be seen
that the drag coefficient at inlet velocity 10 m/s for the
original design and modified design are 0.343 and 0.260,
respectively. This value reveals that the reduction of
aerodynamic pressure is 24.25%. At inlet velocity of 12.5
m/s, the drag coefficient of original design and modified
design are 0.330 and 0.245, respectively. Here the drag
coefficient reduction is 26.58%. Similar calculations have
been made. The drag coefficient reductions at inlet
velocity 15 m/s, 17.5 m/s and 20 m/s are 27.01%, 27.52%,
and 27.78%, respectively. These values reveal that the
proposed modification successfully reduce the drag
coefficient of the car body. For velocity ranges from 10
m/s to 20 m/s, the average reduction is 26.63%.

Figure 3. Velocity Contour and Vector

Figure 5. Comparison of Drag coefficient

4 Conclusions
To improve the performance of an urban concept car for
energy-efficient competition several modifications of the
original design have been proposed. Numerical method
has been developed to investigate the improvement of the
modified design. The aerodynamic drag coefficient is
used as performance comparison. The modified design
Figure 4. Comparison of Pressure contour has been simulated at five different inlet velocities, varies

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MATEC Web of Conferences 220, 02001 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1051/matecconf/201822002001
ICMSC 2018

from 10 m/s to 20 m/s. The fluid flow characteristics Engineering & Industrial Aerodynamics 164, 2017,
have been presented and the aerodynamic drag 138-151.
coefficients have been compared. The conclusions of the 6. H.S. Shim, Y.N. Lee and K.Y. Kim, “Optimization
present study are as follows. The proposed modifications of bobsleigh bumper shape to reduce aerodynamic
shown a better performance in comparison with the drag”, Journal of Wind Engineering & Industrial
original design. At the given inlet velocity, the Aerodynamics 164, 2017, 108-118.
aerodynamic drag coefficient of the proposed design is 7. M. Lorite-Diez, J.I. Jimenez-Gonzales, C. Gutierrez-
lower 26.63% (in averaged) in comparison with the Montes and C. Martinez-Bazan, “Drag reduction of
original design. It is recommended to modify the original slender blunt-based bodies using optimized rear
design of the urban concept car by implementing the cavities”, Journal of Fluids and Structure 74 , 2017,
proposed modifications. The new design will improve the 158-177.
performance of the urban concept car. 8. W. Kieffer, S. Moujaes and N. Armbya, “CFD study
of section characteristics of Formula Mazda race car
wings”, Mathematical and Computer Modelling 43,
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