Abstract
Nowadays the fuel economy has become more and more important to both manufacturers and individual users. The main approach to achieve better fuel economy is to lower the vehicle and improve the aerodynamic performance. Lower vehicle’s mass is to reduce the mass by innovation design of vehicle’s structure, exterior, interior and apply with appropriate materials. To improve the aerodynamic performance mainly is to reduce drag, which is a major factor of highway fuel consumption. In order to maintain the vehicles capacity and comfort, the improvement of aerodynamics should not majorly affect the body shape. The purpose of this research is to apply aerodynamic add-on devices to the Low Mass Vehicle to verify the aerodynamic performance while the vehicle body shape would remain untouched. The research approach is using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique. This project focuses on introducing the idea of Low Mass Vehicle and modern aerodynamic add-on devices and then applying the some of the devices like rear spoiler and vortex generator to the body to study its effects on both drag and lift. It was found that the rear spoiler reduces the drag by 10% and lift by 7%. However, the vortex generator does not affect drag and lift significantly. It was believed that there is potential to improve the aerodynamic performance of the original LMV design. The approach of combination of lowering the mass and improving the aerodynamic is feasible.