Abstract
Recently, with increasing fuel prices and advancing technology, there has been a market for making tractor-trailer trucks more aerodynamically efficient. The tractors are being sold with standard aerodynamic packages but there still exists room for improvement by creating aerodynamic add-on devices for the trailer. A device that is already being used in the aeronautical industry to control the flow of air is the vortex generator. There is a potential for this device to be applied to the trailing edge of the trailer in order to decrease the base wake region area and decrease the overall drag of the truck. Computational fluid dynamics was used in order to analyze the effectiveness of multiple types of vortex generators: wishbone, strake, conventional, delta wing, and aircraft style. SolidWorks was used to model a Peterbilt Model 579 in 3D and ANSYS Fluent was used to simulate the flow situation. The wishbone type and the aircraft type generated the greatest reduction in overall drag of 1.11% and 1.10% respectively in an educational release of ANSYS, while the aircraft type generated a 4.31% reduction in drag in a research release of ANSYS. These results do not compare to the effectiveness of other trailer devices that are currently on the market, but show that vortex generators can be used in order to augment the overall drag reduction when used with other devices.