The Effect of Center Belt Roughness on Vehicle Aerodynamics

Event
SAE World Congress & Exhibition
Authors Abstract
Content
Recently built or refurbished wind tunnel facilities show a trend towards a detailed simulation of road conditions. Therefore, these wind tunnel facilities are equipped with boundary layer conditioning systems and a rolling road consisting of one or several belts in order to simulate the rotation of the wheels and the relative motion between the vehicle underfloor and the road. Belts are either realized in rubber or steel. Steel belts offer the possibility to be coated with rubber to protect the belt itself. This coating additionally offers the possibility to attain a certain roughness to represent the road surface.
This paper presents measurements of the roughness of the steel belt systems installed in the IVK Model Scale and Aero-Acoustic Full Scale Wind Tunnel in comparison to road surfaces. Additionally, the influence of roughness on the aerodynamic coefficients drag and lift is presented and discussed for the SAE reference body with different rear end configurations.
Meta TagsDetails
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4271/2009-01-0776
Pages
8
Citation
Kuthada, T., Schröck, D., Potthoff, J., and Wiedemann, J., "The Effect of Center Belt Roughness on Vehicle Aerodynamics," SAE Int. J. Passeng. Cars - Mech. Syst. 2(1):841-848, 2009, https://doi.org/10.4271/2009-01-0776.
Additional Details
Publisher
Published
Apr 20, 2009
Product Code
2009-01-0776
Content Type
Journal Article
Language
English