Camera Monitor System Soiling Correlation for a Class-8 Truck Using Lattice Boltzmann Method

As Camera Monitoring Systems (CMS) become an integrated part of the driving experience for current automotive and heavy vehicles, keeping the CMS clean from water, dirt, sand, snow and ice is a main focus of the design process in order to avoid safety issues due to obscured visibility. On-road soiling prevention becomes an important feature when designing these camera and sensor systems. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis can be used to facilitate the design process, to provide important information of the cause of the problems and design mitigation mechanism to prevent the visibility issues. There are many published papers for soiling studies for the automotive application but very limited publication available for heavy trucks, this paper is targeted to fill this space. In these current studies during a design process, road tests were performed in Alaska by the testing department. Correlation was done between those road tests and the CFD analysis, performed in-house. This correlation showed a good agreement between CFD and road testing.