Visualising Vehicle Platoon Aerodynamics Using ICFD in LS-DYNA

Since the fuel crisis in the 1970s, platooning of vehicles has been considered as a method of reducing fuel consumption and improving traffic congestion. Up till now, research has primarily considered homogeneous platoons with varying separation distances. Furthermore, the basis of much of the work so far has been experimental instead of computational and so fluid flow interactions between the platooning vehicles are not well understood. The Incompressible Computational Fluid Dynamics (ICFD) solver in LS-DYNA® provides a powerful method to simulate flow interaction around a body and produce data to be used in understanding the aerodynamic behaviour. This paper shows some of the capabilities of LS-DYNA in visualising fluid flow around complex bodies when in platooning formation. Of interest in this paper is the variation of geometry of the vehicles within a platoon with a set separation distance. This paper considers the ability of LS-DYNA to analyse fluid flow interaction between multiple bodies and explores how this could be of use for future platooning research.