Overland trucks - Increasing range through aerodynamics
AirShaper AirShaper
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 Published On Mar 20, 2023

#overland #overlanding #cfd

In this video we will cover the home-made Leviathan, an overland truck conceived & built by Jay Jarvie of @BuilderCreator .

We start off by running an @AirShaper simulation on a regular, boxy overland truck. The drag coefficient of around 0.6 is quite bad, meaning it'll spend a lot of energy pushing the air away.

The initial Leviathan design featured a Cd of 0.5, already a large improvement over the reference truck. Based on the simulation results, we discussed a number of tweaks to the vehicle which included:
- Air deflectors at the front wheels
- Less aggressive angles at the front "bumper"
- Softer angles at the top rear

The result was a 4% reduction in drag, which came at hardly any increase in weight or cost. This goes to show that if you include aerodynamics early on in the design process, you can create gains which will benefit you throughout the lifetime of the product at very little to no cost!

Thanks a million to Jay Jarvie - this really was a fun collaboration and we much look forward to seeing the final overland truck :)


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The AirShaper videos cover the basics of aerodynamics (aerodynamic drag, drag & lift coefficients, boundary layer theory, flow separation, reynolds number...), simulation aspects (computational fluid dynamics, CFD meshing, ...) and aerodynamic testing (wind tunnel testing, flow visualization, ...).

We then use those basics to explain the aerodynamics of (race) cars (aerodynamic efficiency of electric vehicles, aerodynamic drag, downforce, aero maps, formula one aerodynamics, ...), drones and airplanes (propellers, airfoils, electric aviation, eVTOLS, ...), motorcycles (wind buffeting, motogp aerodynamics, ...) and more!

For more information, visit www.airshaper.com

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