Investigations into the Aerodynamic Influence of Trailers Towed by Battery Electric Passenger Cars

You are here: Homepage > Search

Investigations into the Aerodynamic Influence of Trailers Towed by Battery Electric Passenger Cars

Pudell, Etienne / Edelmann, Christopher

The range of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) is a very important factor for a customer’s choice and utilization behavior. One use case is towing a trailer on long distance drives, where the aerodynamic drag is the dominating factor regarding the possible range. Therefore, it is important to know the influence of a towed trailer behind a passenger car.

Wind tunnel investigations of two exemplary passenger cars, one sedan and one sport utility vehicle (SUV), with several trailers are presented. As expected, the aerodynamic drag of a car/trailer unit rises massively compared to the stand-alone car. Compared to the sedan, the SUV builds a more effective ramp-up body for the trailers which results in lower drag values.

Accompanying computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed, allowing a detailed aerodynamic analysis of the car/trailer interaction. A very good agreement between the CFD simulations and the wind tunnel measurements is found. This gives confidence in predicting the aerodynamic drag of new car/trailer combinations with numerical methods.