Modifications in Minibus Design for Drag Reduction

The main objective of this paper is used to reduce drag of the minibus vehicle so as to reduce fuel consumption (power consumption). As Mini-bus is designed as H₂O₂ fuel cell and electric bus, no emissions are created to the environment. Different modified Computer Aided Design (CAD) model of minibus was used and performed Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) on it. While performing CFD on it, various process of simulations are done are importing CAD file from CATIA, designing of wind tunnel in its geometry and using Boolean operations (subtracting the body from tunnel block), Meshing in ANSYS and solving it. Models like k-ε Standard and k-ε Realizable models are used for good results. After observing the results, due to the changes in front and rear part of the minibus, there is reduction of almost 32% of the drag coefficient for Dolphin Bus and 42% of the drag coefficient for Aero-Dolphin Bus which results in a power savings of about 13.5% for Dolphin Bus and 18% for Aero-Dolphin Bus. The name given is Dolphin as it’s front shape is like a Dolphin who has high IQ. So, Advanced Driver Assisted Steering system (ADAS) including Adaptive cruise control system and various future smart technologies can be used in these Dolphin and Aero-Dolphin Buses.