Influence of Geometry of Rear part on the Aerodynamic Drag and Wake Structure of a Vehicle

The substantial part of the drag of an automobile is the pressure drag. Therefore, the car must be designed as it produces minimum pressure drag. The present paper describes effects of geometrical configuration of the rear part of a car on the aerodynamic drag. Experiments were made on 1/5 scale models of fastback and notchback design.

For the fastback car the drag depends heavily on the angle of a rear window. At a certain critical angle the drag shows a sharp peak. This peak drag can be reduced drastically by the tapering of plan form of the rear geometry. For the notch-back design some combination of the angle of rear window and height of trunk deck shows similar maximum in the drag. Methods of avoiding the large drag were also found.

Our experiment was extended to the measurement of structure of wake by hot wire anemometers and total pressure tubes. The correlation between the wake structure and drag was clarified by the consideration of vorticity and circulation.