Numerical–experimental approach for evaluating cross-wind aerodynamic effects on heavy vehicles

Abstract

This article presents a new methodology for the assessment of the limit safety conditions of road heavy vehicles subjected to cross-wind action: for a typical lorry vehicle, the critical wind curves (CWC) that represent the combination of vehicle speed and wind gust speed, which lead to the overcoming of the safety limits have been calculated. The numerical–experimental procedure allows us to evaluate the aerodynamic loads acting on a heavy vehicle for the given turbulent wind conditions and to compute the corresponding vehicle’s response. Experimental data of wind-tunnel tests, together with numerical simulation results are shown.

Keywords:

• Road heavy vehicles
• Turbulent cross wind
• Aerodynamic loads
• Critical wind curves
• Wind-tunnel tests

Acknowledgements

The research developed in this article has been founded by the European Project WEATHER and by MIUR (Numerical modeling of heavy road vehicle dynamics with respect to stability and roll-over, also in the presence of cross-wind action, aimed at setting up diagnostic and safety systems).

Notes

^†WEATHER partners: small and medium enterprises, SME (Meteodyn, Atmos, Emi, Nubila, Geonica, Campbell), enterprise and end-user (Alstom, Lecinena) and Universities (Birmingham Univ., Nottingham Univ. and Politecnico Milano).

^†The numerical model of the admittance function developed on the basis of the Cooper theory will be presented in a forthcoming article.

^‡The gust velocity is given by U _gust=Ū+3·σ _U with Ū as the mean wind velocity and σ _U =I _u Ū as its standard deviation.