Research
Vehicle Aerodynamics Research Group
The vehicle aerodynamics research group is one of the largest such university-based research groups in the world. Research activity encompasses both experimental and computational approaches to address both fundamental and applied vehicle aerodynamics questions.
The activities include experimental and computational studies applying a very broad range of techniques including planar and tomographic PIV, pressure, balance and DES/LES to a range of test cases and problems including fundamental, reference and generic test geometries and real vehicles. The group has access to high quality wind tunnels and instrumentation, HPC and commercial and in-house CFD codes. A particular strength of the group is the complementary use of experimental and computational methods. In 2019 the Automotive wind tunnel was added to the EPSRC funded National Wind tunnel facility.
The group is taking a leading role in publishing open access validation-quality data sets that can be downloaded from our institutional research repository:
- SAE Notchback reference model (test case for the 1st International Automotive CFD workshop- Oxford)
- Windsor reference test case (test case for the 2nd International Automotive CFD workshop Berlin)
- DrivAer reference case
- Axisymmetric fundamental test case.
Broad areas of interest include:
- Drag reduction
- Flow control, using active methods to modify the wake balance and reduce drag
- Race Car aerodynamics – aerodynamics of cornering
- Wake topology, wake dynamics, bi-stability, and multi-stability
- Real world aerodynamics, including the influence of the environment and other vehicles on vehicle drag and its optimisation
- Crosswind and straight-line stability
- Multi-phase flow applied to the measurement and modelling of surface water and dispersed phase surface contamination
- Dispersed phase modelling and experimental analysis for autonomous system
