Assessment of LES, IDDES and RANS approaches for prediction of wakes behind notchback road vehicles

Abstract The capability of Large Eddy Simulations (LES), Improved Delayed Detached Eddy Simulations (IDDES) and Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes Equations (RANS) to predict the flow behind notchback Ahmed body is investigated in the present paper. Simulations consider two specific models, with effective backlight angles of β 1 = 17.8 ° and β 2 = 21.0 ° , respectively. The focus of the study is on the prediction of the expected lateral asymmetry or symmetry of the near-wake flows. Results show that IDDES using coarse computational grids predicts the flow in agreement with LES using finer computational grids. RANS results in inaccurate flow predictions, attributed to its steady formulation relying on turbulence modelling being incapable of dealing with the studied flow. Modal analysis applying Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) suggests the consistency of the wake dynamics between IDDES and LES. The presence of the wake bi-stability is validated by the wind tunnel experiment.