Water Ingestion and Pressure Analysis of Automotive Vehicles using Multiphase CFD

Within the advances in CFD codes and HPC cluster size and processing capacities, multiphase CFD simulations became more feasible not only on research projects but also in production level. This work presents a simulation analysis of an automotive vehicle crossing certain height of water and analyzing the water ingestion by the air intake system and also the pressure load due to the water level and splashes reaching the vehicle. All the calculations were performed by Computational Fluid Dynamics, considering the car crossing 300mm of water height at 20 kph with a simulation time enough to the water reaches the whole car length. Results show the water path at the snorkel region and some part pressure load examples which can be used as an input for structural simulations to evaluate this part at this particular condition.