Numerical investigations of the flow around a ground vehicles platoon

This work is devoted to the numerical study of the flow in three dimensions around simplified ground vehicles on top of a road. Direct numerical simulations of the flow by obstacles are performed using the penalization method with an accurate approximation. The computing code is very efficiently parallelized in order to perform 3D computations on several billions of unknowns. The applications concern Ahmed bodies platooning when the distance between the vehicles varies. The results show an important variation of the drag coefficient of the vehicles with respect to the distance due to the flow behaviour but the platooning is always very efficient for short distances.