Experimental and Numerical Investigation of the DrivAer Model

Automotive aerodynamic research often focuses on strongly simplified car models, such as the Ahmed body and the SAE model. Due to their high degree of abstraction, however, interference effects are often neglected which leads to an unrealistic representation of the flow field. Consequently, these results cannot be directly used for the aerodynamic optimization of production vehicles. On the other hand, aerodynamic investigations of real production vehicles are often limited due to the restricted availability of the geometric data. Therefore, a new realistic generic car model for aerodynamic research — the DrivAer body — is proposed. This paper focuses on the development of the model, summarizes first experimental results of the different configurations of the fastback geometry and compares them to numerical simulations performed using the open source software OpenFOAM^®.