Abstract
Engineers have been changing vehicle designs to make them more fuel efficient with better combustion technology and more aerodynamic shapes. However, there are billions of vehicles out on the roads with poor aerodynamic designs. For these billions of vehicles engineers cannot take back but engineers have control of new vehicle designs and can redesign and make them more fuel-efficient. One of the ways to reduce fuel consumption is to reduce vehicle drag. Aerospace industries have been using devices called Vortex Generator (VGs) to reduce flow separation. Engineers have been using VGs to improve heat transfer rates in heat exchangers. VGs are fairly simple and small devices and one can add to any vehicle and reduce fuel consumption if they truly reduce drag on vehicles. This thesis investigated VGs to reduce drag of a generic SUV using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). For all CFD simulations, ANSYS FLUENT is utilized after the computational domain and the meshing are created. First, the CFD results are validated using experimental data available for the generic SUV. There were numerous different VG designs that were evaluated, however, only the best five are discussed. This work proves that small delta wing VGs can decrease the drag of generic SUV by 4.23%. The small delta wing was evaluated for different angles of attack along with different free stream velocities. Vortex generator with 0o angle of attack was the most effective at reducing drag. Also small delta VGs prove to reduce drag at wide range of velocities.