Numerical Investigation on the Characterization of Interaction Between the Tire-Wake-Vortices and 5-Belt MGP Turntable

Approximately ninety percent of automotive wind tunnels in the world have incorporated or been built with a Moving Ground Plane (MGP). However, very little research has been published in the literature on the interaction of the MGP and the vehicle. The goal of this paper is to characterize the flow structures and unsteady motion of the isolated wheel wake and its interaction with a 5-belt MGP using numerical simulations. This paper is divided into three parts. In the first part, a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) study is carried out on the Mears (2004) wheel using IDDES model where the CFD process to be used later is validated against the experimental data. In the second part, a simulation is carried out for a 5-belt MGP system and the verification is carried out using the Von Karman integral formula for the boundary layer development over the belts. Finally, an IDDES simulation is carried out with the Mears tire model placed in a 5-belt MGP model in order to provide insights into the flow interactions of the wheel-wake-vortices with the MGP.