Investigation on aerodynamic characteristics of tailing vehicle hood in a two-vehicle platoon

Experimental and numerical methods were performed to study the hood aerodynamics of a 1:18 scale vehicle model in a two-vehicle platoon under different fixed intra spacing and dynamic intra spacing at the Reynolds number of 4.9 × 10⁵ and 4.08 × 10⁵ in a 1:15 scale wind tunnel. Blockage ratio was calculated to be 5.6% for experiments. The averaged and fluctuating pressures of the hood of the tailing vehicle are much higher than that of single vehicle, and stronger fluctuation occurs at the front and rear edges of hood. Pressure fluctuation over the tailing vehicle hood increases as the intra spacing diminishes but sharply declines within intra spacing of 0.2 L. The energy of fluctuation is concentrated in frequency bands from 50 to 110 Hz at wind speed of 30 m/s and 40–90 Hz at wind speed of 25 m/s. Energy at the main frequency bands and peak frequencies take up nearly 25% of total energy, respectively. The results of proper orthogonal decomposition show that total energy proportion is 49.6% for the first 11 modes and 67.0% for the first 30 modes, respectively. Relative motion at low speed has no discernible effect on hood behavior and peak frequencies have inclination to decline during the process of vehicle approaching.