Large Eddy Simulation of Vehicle Aerodynamics Using Parallel Computational Fluids Dynamics

Large eddy simulation (LES) is used to study the flow around a simplified car model. The model consists of one bluff body slanted at the back-end. The LES was made at the Reynolds number of 0.51 × 10⁶ based on the height of the rear model and the inlet air velocity. Four variants of the model were studied, one where the simulation was conducted with a single processor until combined all four processors to compute. The results of the LES simulations were used to analyze the flow field around the body and the back-end. Large vortical structures around the front box and in the gap were identified. The flow field analysis showed how these large vortical structures are responsible for the difference in the accuracy of drag force for the model that arises when the number of processors increase from one to eight processors along with different decomposing techniques.