Exterior Water Flow Simulation

The Water Tightness group at Volvo Cars is responsible for creating and maintaining requirements and thresholds regarding water flows on a car. This is performed by doing extensive physical testing while making sure that databases and previous requirements are kept up to date. Previously the big focus for the Water Tightness department has been physical testing as there were no other options. During the last years, CFD (computational fluid mechanics) has had a swift development and consequently the group has made the decision to investigate whether there is an opportunity to apply it in their line of work. Initially the project was only supposed to include the CFD software Star-CCM+. For the first few weeks the setup and settings in this program were developed for each area of the car. Halfway through the project a new software called PreonLab was introduced. This is a somewhat simplified version of certain functions within Star-CCM+. A new objective was then created within the project to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of each software and compare them to each other. With this in mind, this thesis is a study not only in finding and studying different water flow phenomenon on a car, but also to get an understanding of whether CDF is possible to apply in these specific cases