Nowadays, one of the most important roles in vehicle development is the aerodynamic, which aims efficiency on fuel consumption and leads to a green technology. Several initiatives around the world are regulating emissions and efficiency of vehicles such as EURO for European Marketing and the INOVAR Project to be implemented in Brazil on 2017.
Thus, this study intend to perform an optimization to minimize the drag force of a hatchback vehicle. The main goal of this work is demonstrate the potential of optimization techniques to provide an aerodynamic shape improvement for the driver side outside rear view mirror of a hatchback vehicle. The optimization solver used in this work is the Adjoint Solver, which makes shape sensitivity analysis and mesh/volume morphing.
The study was conducted using CFD simulations to reduce the drag force of current production hatchback vehicle previously validated and correlated in wind tunnel test. Firstly, the optimization solver is used to improve the surface of the view mirror to decrease its drag force. Results show drag coefficient decrease in 0.008 for the optimized surface of the view mirror. This work demonstrated the potential of optimization technique, which can be applied in early stages of projects and extended to optimize several surfaces of body vehicle.