Influence of numerics and analysis of external flow over a three-dimensional realistic car model

Fuel consumption of road cars has been a main issue for the global automotive industry. Engineering tools such as wind tunnels and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have been employed for vehicle design, aiming at aerodynamic efficiency. However, wind tunnels are very expensive facilities. In this scenario, CFD arises as the best cost-effective tool for solution on aerodynamics. This paper presents the influence of numerics on drag prediction and the analysis of turbulent flow over a 3D realistic car model. Therefore, the main contributions of this short paper are: (a) to present a brief discussion about the regions of high instabilities and turbulent kinetic energy over the DrivAer Fastback car model, as well as (b) to outline the influence of numeric on drag prediction. The objective is to provide a significant cost-benefit of numerical setup to the automotive industry for the development of road cars.