Numerical Simulations for the Design of Active Rear Spoiler

Spoiler is popularly used at the rear of vehicles in order to look sporty, improve the energy efficiency, enhance the driving comfort and so on. In this paper, the influence of the rear spoiler's angle of attack on the drag/lift force/coefficient at different velocities is investigated by computational fluid dynamics simulations. The results reveal that it is important to set an appropriate angle of attack for the van's rear spoiler as the drag force changes dramatically at different angle of attack. However, it is not that necessary to develop an active rear spoiler which adaptively changes its angle of attack at different running speed as the lowest drag force is always achieved at an almost fixed angle of attack.