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QUALITY PREDICTION
OPENING THE
WINDOW TO
SIMULATION
Simulation helps to predict and reduce
side window buffeting.
By Ulli Kishore Chand, CAE Engineer; Upender Gade, Senior Technical Lead; and Pawan Pathak, Technical Lead
Tata Technologies Limited, Pune, India
I
magine that while driving you open the window to let in
A-pillar cool, fresh air. But soon, you feel uncomfortable pulsations
and hear noise, called wind buffeting or wind throbbing.
Other sources of vehicle noise have been reduced, so automo-
tive engineers are spending more time and effort addressing
wind buffeting. Traditionally, engineers have built and tested
B-pillar Acoustic waves each design to determine how it performs with regard to wind
buffeting. However, Tata Technologies engineers are now accu-
rately simulating wind buffeting with ANSYS Fluent compu-
Wind buffeting can intensify due to flow-acoustic feedback. tational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, making it possible to
evaluate many different designs without the time and cost
involved in building a prototype.
Case 1 Case 2
Case 3 Case 4
Case 5
Five wind buffeting cases studied by Tata Technologies
A-pillar
RVM
this process generates self-sustaining APPLYING SIMULATION conditions for vehicle speeds between
oscillations that can create large pres- TO WIND BUFFETING 80 and 100 kilometers per hour.
sure variations in the cabin that are Working with leading automotive Virtual mannequins represent vehi-
uncomfortable and annoying for vehi- original equipment manufacturers, cle occupants, and other cabin details
cle passengers. Tata Technologies engineers are using like dashboard, seats, interior trim,
numerical methods to simulate wind etc. were used to accurately model
LIMITATIONS OF buffeting in the early stages of the prod- the cabin volume.
PHYSICAL TESTING uct development process, long before Tata Technologies engineers per-
To increase passenger comfort, prototypes are available. In the exam- formed boundary meshing of each CAD
automotive manufacturers have been ple shown here, engineers used CATIA model and then used ANSYS software to
steadily reducing structure -borne computer-aided design (CAD) to create generate a volume mesh. Four stages of
and airborne noise. Vehicles now five models: grid refinement were used with the fin-
operate much more quietly, but this est mesh in the area around the window
makes wind buffeting more notice- Case 1: Front window completely and rear-view mirror to resolve the tur-
able than it had been in the past. The open, rear window closed bulent structures and boundary layer.
frequency of wind buffeting is often Case 2: Front window closed, rear Buffeting is an inherently transient and
below the range that can be heard by window completely open complex turbulent phenomenon that
human ears, yet passengers can still Case 3: Front window slightly open, involves generation and interaction of
experience an unsettling fluctuating rear window completely open nonlinear turbulent eddies at the win-
force. Engineers measure these pres- Case 4: Front window halfway open, dow corners. This poses a challenge in
sure fluctuations generated by wind rear window completely open terms of computational resources.
buffeting with microphones. They Case 5: Front window closed, rear A steady-state compressible Reynolds-
then typically perform Fourier trans- window completely open, split pillar averaged NavierStokes (RANS)/k- solu-
form analysis on the analog signal to divided rear window tion was used to initialize an unsteady
convert it to an acoustic spectrum in large-eddy simulation (LES) solution. LES
which amplitude is plotted as a func- The objective of the study was to models resolve large turbulent structures
tion of frequency to better understand understand the influence of partially in both time and space as well as simu-
the causes of buffeting and its effects or fully open combinations of win- late the influence of large-scale eddies
on vehicle passengers. These mea- dows while cruising. A split-bar was that are responsible for generating acous-
surements can be performed only rel- installed in one of the cases to study tic sources on the window posts. The flow
atively late in the design process when the effect of altering window geometry. simulation calculated unsteady static
vehicle prototypes have been cre- All cases were simulated at ambient pressure signals at four locations near
ated. At this point, many design deci-
sions have been made, so changes are
expensive and run the risk of delay- Tata Technologies engineers accurately
ing product introduction. Physical
testing and design validation are con- simulate automotive wind buffeting,
ducted in anechoic wind tunnel facili-
ties, which are expensive and complex
making it possible to evaluate many different
to build and maintain. Sometimes they designs without the time and cost involved
provide only very rudimentary diag-
nostic information, so engineers must in building a prototype.
rely upon intuition and experience in
developing alternative solutions.