An Evaluation of Open Source CFD for Study of Aerodynamics of Vehicle Platooning

Author(s):  
T. Farid ◽  
A. Shakeel ◽  
M. Sajid

Abstract The ever-growing road congestion and safety hazards induced by conventional highways has inspired the development of automated highways which provides four key benefits: fuel economy, environmental protection, road safety and smooth traffic flow. Vehicle platooning is a vital component of automated highways which contributes directly to these four benefits with its sequence of closely spaced leader-follower vehicle configuration by taking advantage of the ‘slip-stream’ effect to minimize the aerodynamic drag. Exploratory studies into platooning parameters, vehicle spacing, speeds and number of vehicles, have proven to be prohibitive expensive both computationally and experimentally due to the complexity of tests and the large number of test cases. In recent years, OpenFOAM® an independently developed, supported and documented open-source toolbox has gained popularity by offering a lower cost alternative to leading commercial CFD products. This paper summarizes the results from a computational study of autonomous vehicle platoons and the capability of OpenFOAM® to substitute leading commercial CFD solutions currently used to support vehicle aerodynamic development. This study investigates the aerodynamic characteristics of a 4-SUV platoon at inter-vehicle distances ranging from 0.25 to 1 SUV length at a constant speed of 23 m/s. Trends of the predicted aerodynamic drag coefficients (Cd) are then compared against experimental data from published literature as well as the results obtained from a leading commercial CFD package.

2019 ◽  
Vol 128 ◽  
pp. 10002
Author(s):  
Angel Huminic ◽  
Gabriela Huminic

This paper presents new results concerning the aerodynamics of the Ahmed body fitted with a non-flat underbody diffuser. As in previous investigations performed, the angle and the length of the diffuser are the parameters systematically varied within ranges relevant for a hatchback passenger car. Coefficients of lift and drag are compared with the values obtained for the flat underbody diffuser, and the results reveal significant improvements concerning aerodynamic characteristics of body.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 1031-1036
Author(s):  
Guilherme A. Pimentel ◽  
Rafael de Vasconcelos ◽  
Aurélio Salton ◽  
Alexandre Bazanella

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3850
Author(s):  
Bastien Vincke ◽  
Sergio Rodriguez Rodriguez Florez ◽  
Pascal Aubert

Emerging technologies in the context of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) have drastically evolved the industry’s qualification requirements. AVs incorporate complex perception and control systems. Teaching the associated skills that are necessary for the analysis of such systems becomes a very difficult process and existing solutions do not facilitate learning. In this study, our efforts are devoted to proposingan open-source scale model vehicle platform that is designed for teaching the fundamental concepts of autonomous vehicles technologies that are adapted to undergraduate and technical students. The proposed platform is as realistic as possible in order to present and address all of the fundamental concepts that are associated with AV. It includes all on-board components of a stand-alone system, including low and high level functions. Such functionalities are detailed and a proof of concept prototype is presented. A set of experiments is carried out, and the results obtained using this prototype validate the usability of the model for the analysis of time- and energy-constrained systems, as well as distributed embedded perception systems.


2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niels Troldborg

A comprehensive computational study, in both steady and unsteady flow conditions, has been carried out to investigate the aerodynamic characteristics of the Risø-B1-18 airfoil equipped with variable trailing edge geometry as produced by a hinged flap. The function of such flaps should be to decrease fatigue-inducing oscillations on the blades. The computations were conducted using a 2D incompressible RANS solver with a k-w turbulence model under the assumption of a fully developed turbulent flow. The investigations were conducted at a Reynolds number of Re = 1.6 · 106. Calculations conducted on the baseline airfoil showed excellent agreement with measurements on the same airfoil with the same specified conditions. Furthermore, a more widespread comparison with an advanced potential theory code is presented. The influence of various key parameters, such as flap shape, flap size and oscillating frequencies, was investigated so that an optimum design can be suggested for application with wind turbine blades. It is concluded that a moderately curved flap with flap chord to airfoil curve ratio between 0.05 and 0.10 would be an optimum choice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-117
Author(s):  
Mikhail Podrigalo ◽  
◽  
Volodymyr Krasnokutskyi ◽  
Vitaliy Kashkanov ◽  
Olexander Tkachenko ◽  
...  

Aerodynamic characteristics have a major impact on the energy efficiency and traction and speed properties of the vehicle. In this article, based on previous studies of the aerodynamic characteristics of various car models, we propose an improved method for selecting engine and transmission parameters at the design stage. The aim of the study is to improve the dynamic properties of the car by improving the method of selecting the main parameters of the engine-transmission unit by refining the calculation of aerodynamic drag. To achieve it, the following tasks must be solved: to specify the method of selecting the maximum effective engine power; to specify a technique of definition of the maximum constructive speed of the car; to develop a technique for selecting gear ratios. The aerodynamic resistance to the movement of the vehicle is determined by the frontal coefficient of the specified resistance, the density of the air, the area of the frontal resistance and the speed of the vehicle. It is known from classical works on the aerodynamics of a car that in the range of vehicle speeds from 20 m / s to 80 m / s, taking the law of squares when assessing the force of air resistance, it is necessary to change the coefficient of frontal aerodynamic drag depending on the speed of the car. However, when carrying out calculations, this coefficient is taken constant, which leads to obtaining large values of the air resistance force at high speeds and lower at low speeds. There are two possible ways to improve the dynamic properties and energy efficiency of the car during its modernization (increasing the maximum design speed of the car by reducing the gear ratio in higher gear; reducing the maximum efficiency of the engine while maintaining the previous gear ratio in higher gear). As a result of the study, the method of selection (maximum effective engine power; maximum design speed of the car; gear ratios) at the design stage of the parameters of the motor-transmission unit of the car has been improved.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1042 ◽  
pp. 188-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xing Jun Hu ◽  
Jing Chang

In order to analyze the impact of engine cabin parts on aerodynamic characteristics, the related parts are divided into three categories except the engine cooling components: front thin plates (average thickness of 2mm), bottom-suspension and interior panels. The aerodynamic drag coefficient (Cd) were obtained upon the combination schemes consisting of the three types of parts by numerical simulation. Results show that Cd by simulation is closer to the test value gained by the wind tunnel experiment when front thin plates were simplified to the two-dimensional interface with zero thickness. The error is only 5.23%. Meanwhile this scheme reduces grid numbers, thus decreasing the calculating time. As the front thin plates can guide the flow, there is no difference on the Cd values gained from the model with or without bottom-suspension or interior panels when the engine cabin contains the front thin plates; while only both bottom-suspension and interior panels are removed, the Cd value can be reduced when the cabin doesn’t contain the front thin plates.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2090 (1) ◽  
pp. 012101
Author(s):  
D Alfonso-Corcuera ◽  
S. Pindado ◽  
M Ogueta-Gutiérrez ◽  
A Sanz-Andrés

Abstract In the present work, the effect of the friction forces at bearings on cup anemometer performance is studied. The study is based on the classical analytical approach to cup anemometer performance (2-cup model), used in the analysis by Schrenk (1929) and Wyngaard (1981). The friction torque dependence on temperature was modelled using exponential functions fitted to the experimental results from RISØ report #1348 by Pedersen (2003). Results indicate a logical poorer performance (in terms of a lower rotation speed at the same wind velocity), with an increase of the friction. However, this decrease of the performance is affected by the aerodynamic characteristics of the cups. More precisely, results indicate that the effect of the friction is modified depending on the ratio between the maximum value of the aerodynamic drag coefficient (at 0° yaw angle) and the minimum one (at 180° yaw angle). This reveals as a possible way to increase the efficiency of the cup anemometer rotors. Besides, if the friction torque is included in the equations, a noticeable deviation of the rotation rate (0.5-1% with regard to the expected rotation rate without considering friction) is found for low temperatures.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eshaan Khanapuri ◽  
Veera Venkata Tarun Kartik Chintalapati ◽  
Rajnikant Sharma ◽  
Ryan Gerdes

<p>The security of cyber-physical systems, such as vehicle platoons, is critical to ensuring their proper operation and acceptance to society. In platooning, vehicles follow one another according to an agreed upon control law that determines vehicle separation. It has been shown that a vehicle within a platoon and under the control of a malicious actor could cause collisions involving, or decrease the efficiency of, surrounding vehicles. In this paper we focus on detecting, identifying and mitigating so called destabilizing attacks that could cause vehicle collisions. Our approach is decentralized and requires only local sensor information for each vehicle to identify the vehicle responsible for the attack and then deploy an appropriate mitigating controller that prevents collisions. A Deep Learning approach (Convolutional Neural Network) with various data preprocessing techniques are used to detect and identify the malicious vehicle. Results indicate that with noise upto 30% in range/relative speed data we achieve an accuracy upto 96.3%. Also, once the adversarial vehicle is localized, we derive conditions for controller gains using Routh Hurwitz criterion to mitigate the attack and ensure stability of the platoon. Realistic simulator CARLA and MATLAB simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches</p>


Robotics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aakash Soni ◽  
Huosheng Hu

Autonomous/unmanned driving is the major state-of-the-art step that has a potential to fundamentally transform the mobility of individuals and goods. At present, most of the developments target standalone autonomous vehicles, which can sense the surroundings and control the vehicle based on this perception, with limited or no driver intervention. This paper focuses on the next step in autonomous vehicle research, which is the collaboration between autonomous vehicles, mainly vehicle formation control or vehicle platooning. To gain a deeper understanding in this area, a large number of the existing published papers have been reviewed systemically. In other words, many distributed and decentralized approaches of vehicle formation control are studied and their implementations are discussed. Finally, both technical and implementation challenges for formation control are summarized.


Author(s):  
Marc Compere ◽  
Garrett Holden ◽  
Otto Legon ◽  
Roberto Martinez Cruz

Abstract Autonomous vehicle researchers need a common framework in which to test autonomous vehicles and algorithms along a realism spectrum from simulation-only to real vehicles and real people. The community needs an open-source, publicly available framework, with source code, in which to develop, simulate, execute, and post-process multi-vehicle tests. This paper presents a Mobility Virtual Environment (MoVE) for testing autonomous system algorithms, vehicles, and their interactions with real and simulated vehicles and pedestrians. The result is a network-centric framework designed to represent multiple real and multiple virtual vehicles interacting and possibly communicating with each other in a common coordinate frame with a common timestamp. This paper presents a literature review of comparable autonomous vehicle softwares, presents MoVE concepts and architecture, and presents three experimental tests with multiple virtual and real vehicles, with real pedestrians. The first scenario is a traffic wave simulation using a real lead vehicle and 3 real follower vehicles. The second scenario is a medical evacuation scenario with 2 real pedestrians and 1 real vehicles. Real pedestrians are represented using live-GPS-followers streaming GPS position from mobile phones over the cellular network. Time-history and spatial plots of real and virtual vehicles are presented with vehicle-to-vehicle distance calculations indicating where and when potential collisions were detected and avoided. The third scenario highlights the avoid() behavior successfully avoiding other virtual vehicles and 1 real pedestrian in a small outdoor area. The MoVE set of concepts and interfaces are implemented as open-source software available for use and customization within the autonomous vehicle community. MoVE is freely available under the GPLv3 open-source license at gitlab.com/comperem/move.


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