Analysis of Flow Structures in Wake Flows for Train Aerodynamics

Abstract: Train transportation is a vital part of the transportation system of today anddue to its safe and environmental friendly concept it will be even more impor-tant in the future. The speeds of trains have increased continuously and withhigher speeds the aerodynamic effects become even more important. One aero-dynamic effect that is of vital importance for passengers’ and track workers’safety is slipstream, i.e. the flow that is dragged by the train. Earlier ex-perimental studies have found that for high-speed passenger trains the largestslipstream velocities occur in the wake. Therefore the work in this thesis isdevoted to wake flows. First a test case, a surface-mounted cube, is simulatedto test the analysis methodology that is later applied to a train geometry, theAerodynamic Train Model (ATM). Results on both geometries are comparedwith other studies, which are either numerical or experimental. The comparisonfor the cube between simulated results and other studies is satisfactory, whiledue to a trip wire in the experiment the results for the ATM do not match.The computed flow fields are used to compute the POD and Koopman modes.For the cube this is done in two regions of the flow, one to compare with a priorpublished study Manhart & Wengle (1993) and another covering more of theflow and especially the wake of the cube. For the ATM, a region containing theimportant flow structures is identified in the wake, by looking at instantaneousand fluctuating velocities. To ensure converged POD modes two methods toinvestigate the convergence are proposed, tested and applied. Analysis of themodes enables the identification of the important flow structures. The flowtopologies of the two geometries are very different and the flow structures arealso different, but the same methodology can be applied in both cases. For thesurface-mounted cube, three groups of flow structures are found. First groupis the mean flow and then two kinds of perturbations around the mean flow.The first perturbation is at the edge of the wake, relating to the shear layerbetween the free stream and the disturbed flow. The second perturbation isinside the wake and is the convection of vortices. These groups would then betypical of the separation bubble that exists in the wake of the cube. For theATM the main flow topology consists of two counter rotating vortices. Thiscan be seen in the decomposed modes, which, except for the mean flow, almostonly contain flow structures relating to these vortices.