Increasing the Efficiency of Electric Vehicles through Improving the Aerodynamic Characteristics

In recent years, environmental concerns are the greatest challenge in vehicle design. Electric vehicles seem to be a suitable solution to this problem. Therefore, numerous measures have been taken to increase the efficiency, reduce losses, and improve the performance of these vehicles. Aerodynamic characteristics improvement is a key issue that should be considered in vehicle design. In this paper, the effects of improving the aerodynamic characteristics on the electric vehicles are analyzed. For this purpose, installing movable rear spoiler along with a controller and covering the rear wheels have been proposed. In order to evaluate the proposed solutions, their effects on an electric vehicle prototype that has been constructed and developed by the authors have been modeled in MATLAB SIMULINK environment. The flow around the electric vehicle has been studied in ANSYS in order to calculate the drag and lift coefficients. The flow has been numerically solved using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The standard k-ε turbulence model has been utilized in this study. The results show that improvement of aerodynamic characteristics in electric vehicles not only increases the stability of the vehicle, but also has a significant impact on the energy storage system, mileage, and the electric motor efficiency.