Ground clearance, rolling road, and scale effects on the wake of a bluff body: applications to pollutant dispersion in automotive engineering

The aim of this study is to investigate the ground clearance effects on the flow topology that is developed in the downstream of a simplified car model. Different velocities, scaled models (covering Reynolds numbers up to 300,000) and ground clearances will be studied. Their influence on the wake of the Ahmed body will be analysed from the velocity and turbulent fields obtained by non-intrusive (such as LDA) and intrusive (such as HWA and pressure probes) measurement techniques. Different rear slant angles will be also investigated experimentally. This study also involves computations using ANSYS software. The computational results will be compared with experimental results (from our own measurements or literature).