Energy efficiency has become a major requirement and constraint in the automotive industry, playing a fundamental role on the product development. A relevant contribution to achieve lower fuel consumption and CO2 emission is given by the aerodynamic efficiency.
Drag resistance reduction requires to develop and apply up to date analysis tools, to be able to rapidly evaluate and validate style shapes as a trade-off between drag performance and pure style requirements. Since the product development plans have highly stretched timings and several refinement loops may be required to achieve all the targets, the ability to analyse in detail the flow field characteristics in the most critical areas for a “bluff body” must be combined with the need to obtain the necessary information in a short time compatible with the vehicle planning. Therefore, both physical tests and virtual analysis simulations have to be applied and integrated throughout the development process.
This paper intends to present, with some application examples, both analytical techniques and experimental measurement in the wind tunnel, together with the improvements introduced to the management of the product development process, that have been recently carried out in the design of the latest vehicles with low environmental impact