The purpose of this study was to develop the aerodynamic study of a minibus vehicle. With the objective reduce fuel consumption and consequently the emission of harmful gases to the environment, given that the aerodynamic improvements have reduced cost compared to improvement of the internal combustion engine.
The proposed initial of the project was to identify the aerodynamic coefficient of the existing vehicle from the 3D CAD model. After preliminary analysis of the model and based on studies conducted are effected changes in order to achieve better results in the design of new generations of the vehicle.
The simulation of the air flow over the vehicle was performed in three steps: design on SolidWorks CAD, discretization of the computational domain using ICEM CFD meshing and BETA CAE ANSA and ANSYS (FLUENT) solve to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).we used the turbulence models of two equations k-ε Standard and k-ε Realizable having a better approximation of the actual result.
Was verified that through small changes in geometry can improve the aerodynamic performance of the minibus and consequently reduce vehicle fuel consumption and emission of environmentally harmful gases. Analyzing the results, it was observed that small changes in geometry of the vehicle has been possible to achieve a reduction of almost 20% of the drag coefficient which results in a fuel savings of about 10%, being possible to deploy this change in any current model of minibus due to them being changes that do not impact on the structure and existing project.