Experimental Investigation of Wake Boards for Drag Reduction on an Ahmed Body

Commercial heavy trucks are characterized as bluffbodies and have unsteady wake flows and high base drag. Base drag has been studied for many years as a primary target for aerodynamic drag reduction. Many aftend devices have been created for active or passive reduction of base drag. Base flaps are one type of device that have shown promise for drag reduction. They consist of 3 or 4 panels joined at their edges to form an open box structure. Although base flaps have been shown to reduce drag, they have not been adopted by the trucking industry because they are inconvenient to deploy on a commercial scale. A practical refinement to base flaps is the two-panel wake board (WB). It is a commercially viable solution, with easy deployment and significant drag reduction. This paper presents experimental data for two-panel wake boards with varying width and inset on an Ahmed body at yaw angles up to 12 degrees.