Introduction of a New Realistic Generic Car Model for Aerodynamic Investigations 2012-01-0168

State-of-the-art aerodynamic research of vehicles often employs strongly simplified car models, such as the Ahmed and the SAE body, to gain general insights. As these models exhibit a high degree of abstraction, the obtained results can only partly be used for the aerodynamic optimization of production vehicles. Aerodynamic research performed on specific vehicles is on the other hand often limited due to their short life span and restricted access. A new realistic generic car model for aerodynamic research - the DrivAer body - is therefore proposed to close this gap. This paper focuses on the development of the model and the first experimental results, namely force and pressure measurements of the different configurations. The experiments were performed in the recently updated Wind Tunnel A of the Institute of Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics at the Technische Universität München.