Unsteady Flow around an Exposed Rotating Wheel

Abstract

The flow around an exposed rotating wheel, such as those on a Formula 1 car, is complex in nature; experimental investigation using wind tunnel is expensive and may not be able to show intricate flow features. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can enable numerical solutions of flow over an exposed wheel, but due to issues of computational cost only steady-state Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) methods are commonly used. In the present work, an exposed rotating wheel in contact with a moving ground was modeled using unsteady RANS, Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and Detached Eddy Simulation (DES). These transient methods demonstrate more intricate details of the flow not seen in steady state simulations. In addition, LES and DES more accurately resolves the large scale eddies that will be apparent especially in the wheel wake and enable the flow field to be understood in a more complete way.