Aerodynamic Analysis of a Concept Truck and Trailer for Grain
Transportation 2023-36-0353
Brazil is significant grain (soy, corn, beans and rice) producer in the planet
and the road transportation is needed even when rail and maritime mode is
used.
There are opportunities to improve the grain road transportation efficiency. This
paper presents one opportunity which is the aerodynamic drag reduction and
therefore the fuel and energy consumption reduction on grain road
transportation.
This paper will discuss some alternatives to reduce aerodynamic drag on such
application considering Brazilian market regulation which has a low limit for
front axle load (lower than European regulation for instance) and limit the
total composition length. As an example of some alternatives to reduce drag
there is the frontal area reduction and trailer to cab gap reduction. Some of
those alternatives were implemented on a concept truck briefly presented on this
paper, which was tested on a real application, this paper will illustrate some
of those alternatives implemented.
Also, this paper presents the aerodynamic analysis using CFD and the strategy
used to run quicker analysis using steady state k-epsilon turbulence model
rather than transient DES, such strategy shows adequate correlation with wind
tunnel tests. Also, this paper briefly describes the strategy to correlate the
real application which has random yaw angles and air speed with CFD
simulation.
The authors intend that the alternatives to improve transported efficiency
presented in this work can influence the market and can be applied on the truck
grain transport application saving fuel/energy and cost which could be
translated on lower food cost and sustainable transportation.
