Numerical-experimental approach for evaluating cross wind aerodynamic effects on heavy vehicles

This article presents a new methodology for the assessment of the limit safety conditions of road heavy vehicles subjected to cross-wind action: for a typical lorry vehicle, the critical wind curves (CWC) that represent the combination of vehicle speed and wind gust speed, which lead to the overcoming of the safety limits have been calculated. The numerical–experimental procedure allows us to evaluate the aerodynamic loads acting on a heavy vehicle for the given turbulent wind conditions and to compute the corresponding vehicle’s response. Experimental data of wind-tunnel tests, together with numerical simulation results are shown.