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ARTICLE IN PRESSJournal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics 96 (2008) 12076105/$ - doi:10.1016/j Tel.: +33 E-mail /locate/jweiaComputational study of flow around a simplified car body Emmanuel Guilmineau Laboratoire de Me?canique des Fluides, CNRS UMR 6598, Ecole Centrale de Nantes, 44321 Nantes Cedex 3, France Available online 6 August 2007Abstract The Ahmed body is a simplified car used in automotive industry to investigate the influence of the flow structure on the drag. Wake flow is two-dimensional for low incidences of the rear slant, then becomes three-dimensional when the angle of the hatchback approaches 301 and reverts to two- dimensional behavior for angles higher than 301 where above this angle, a sudden drop in drag occurred. In this paper, we investigate numerically the flow around the Ahmed body for the base slant angles 251 and 351. Results are compared with experimental data. The two-dimensional behavior of the flow, for the slant angle 35, is well predicted, whereas the transition of the wake to a fully three-dimensional, for the slant angle 251, is not reproduced. Therefore, the flow around the Ahmed body with 251 slant angle can be considered an open challenge for turbulence modeling. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Bluff body flow; Automotive aerodynamics; Turbulence simulation1. Introduction The study of three-dimensional flow around a ground vehicle has become a subject of significant importance in the automobile industry. One obvious way of improving the fuel economy of vehicles is to reduce aerodynamic drag by optimizing the body shape. Execution of good aerodynamic design under stylistic constraints requires an extensive understanding of the flow phenomena and, especially, how the aerodynamics are in- fluenced by changes in body shape. The flow region which presents the major contributionsee front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. .jweia.2007.06.041 2 40 37 16 81; fax: +33 2 40 37 2