Exterior Water Management Using a Custom Euler-Lagrange Simulation Approach

The reduction of hardware vehicle models during development drives the necessity to transfer most hardware tests to VR Simulation. Exterior water management is one of the topics, where complex physics meet everyday situations.

A vehicle contamination test conducted in a wind tunnel is selected to be transferred to numerical simulation. The method of choice is the Euler-Lagrange approach with modeled ‘liquid’ wall particles. A new wall film model has been developed in the present study to include the observed liquid properties in physical test. This model takes the local wetting conditions into account and constitutes a reformulation of the local force balance of the wall liquid. Also the wall film separation model has been refined and improved. With this new approach, the gas/liquid, liquid/solid and liquid/liquid interaction has been remodeled.

The application of the custom Euler-Lagrange Simulation Approach to the selected contamination test procedure proves the practicability to generally resemble the spread of liquid over a vehicle observed in physical tests by numerical simulation.