In recent years, there has been an overall reduction in greenhouse emissions in
the European Union (EU); however, that is not the case for the transport
industry where road transports are responsible for more than 70% of all the
transports emissions. Transport by trucks and busses is responsible for a fourth
of these greenhouse emissions, and a significant contributor to the energy
consumption of these vehicles is the aerodynamic drag.
A particular branch of truck transport is the transport of timber by the use of
timber trucks. A significant difference to ordinary trucks is that the load of
the timber truck affects the shape and hence its aerodynamic behavior. In
Europe, these timber trucks travel at speeds of up to 80 km/h. At this speed,
the aerodynamic drag accounts for around 20–30% per ton-km of the fuel
consumption for these vehicles.
In this paper computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to investigate and
improve the aerodynamics of a loaded timber truck. Several concepts are
evaluated for high drag regions along the truck. Yaw sweeps are done for the
concepts with large potential to ensure consistent drag reduction. The concepts
are evaluated separately and then combined into three combinations, ranging from
an easy implementable combination to maximum drag reduction, where a 27% to 51%
reduced wind-averaged drag is achieved, respectively.