Aerodynamic Drag Reduction of Tractor-Trailer using Wishbone Type Vortex Generators

Flow control over a tractor-trailer using vortex generator

Flow characteristics over a tractor-trailer model with and without vane-type vortex generator installed

An experimental study has been conducted to investigate the effects of vane-type vortex generators in affecting the flow pattern of the wake region using a 1:20 scale tractor-trailer model. The de Haviland wind tunnel of the University of Glasgow was employed in this study. Surface oil flow visualisation, smoke visualisation and twocomponent time-averaged particle image velocimetry measurements...

An Aerodynamic Assessment of Micro-Drag Generators (MDGs)

Commercial transports as well as fighter aircraft of the future are being designed with very low drag (friction and pressure). Concurrently, commuter airports are being built or envisioned to be built in the centers of metropolitan areas where shorter runways and/or reduced noise footprints on takeoff and landing are required. These requirements and the fact that drag is lower on new vehicles t...

Trailer Steering Control of a Tractor-Trailer Robot

In this paper, we consider active trailer steering control as a means to improve the maneuverability of (long) truck–trailer combinations during cornering. Hereto, we formulate the problem of reducing the so-called swept path width during cornering and that of eliminating unsafe tail swing of the trailer as a tracking control problem. We present a kinematic tractor–trailer model including off-a...

Tractor Trailer Base Region Drag Optimization by a Genetic Algorithm with CFD

A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code has been combined with a genetic algorithm (GA) to perform a two-dimensional drag minimization on the base region of tractor trailers. Few studies have been conducted with CFD driven by a GA due to extensive run times and the general non autonomous characteristics of meshing a suitable CFD geometry. This study solves the two-dimensional Reynolds-average...