Examining the Benefits of Using a Swan Neck Rear Wing to Increase Stability and Fuel Efficiency in an Automotive Vehicle

Overview

Aerodynamic drag and downforce are key factors in automotive design. To decrease drag and increase downforce, novel solutions are created and fluid flow around the vehicles’ bodies is analyzed through different methods to test stability and efficiency. In this work, Ansys ® Fluent, a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program, was used to analyze a swan neck type rear wing mount compared to a regular rear wing support to determine the optimal mounting for aerodynamic forces. The coefficients of forces and flow behavior were analyzed for ten 3-Dresearcher-prepared model configurations of the referential Ahmed Body with different mountings and the airfoil with different angles of attack mounted on top of the mentioned geometry. Through the calculations of forc es and generation of contour and vector graphs, it was found that at both 0° and 15°, the swan neck rear wing mount was able to generate a similar level of downforce with the benefit of lowered drag. At 0°, the swan neck mount and the regular mount had dra g coefficients of 0.32 and 0.37 respectively while having lift coefficients of -0.08 and -0.06 respectively. Similar benefits were achieved by the swan neck rear wing mount in the 15° case. My study revealed that many aerodynamic improvements, such as fuel efficiency, vehicular stability, and improved handling, are generated by switching from a regular rear wing mount to a swan neck mount on an Ahmed Body and supports using swan neck rear wing mounts to contribute to vehicular efficiency. North Carolina

Competition history

• JSHS 2024 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

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