Experimental Investigation of the Ground Transportation Systems (GTS) Project for Heavy Vehicle Drag Reduction

A wind tunnel experimental research program was conducted on a heavily instrumented Ground Transportation System (GTS) vehicle. The GTS baseline model represented a generic 1:8 scale Class-8 van-type tractor trailer geometry. Five base drag reduction add-on devices, instrumented with surface pressure ports, were also tested. These add-on devices included two ogive boattail shapes and three slant geometry devices.

Six component force and moment data, surface pressure contours, and wake velocity surveys are presented for each configuration along with qualitative insights gained from flow visualization.

This wind tunnel program was designed to complement a parallel research effort in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) which modeled many of these same vehicle geometries. The wind tunnel data are documented and archived in ASCII format on floppy discs and available to researchers interested in further analysis or comparison to other CFD solutions.