Influence of the Timber Shape on the Aerodynamics of a Timber Truck

Abstract
The aerodynamic improvement and efficiency of regular goods transportation trucks have been a topic of current interest; however, the timber transport industry has not been receiving as much attention. This is due to the small portion of timber transportation vehicles, compared to regular trucks, not justifying the cost of investigating these vehicles experimentally. Since these vehicles travel large parts of their journey at around 80 km/h, their fuel consumption is heavily affected by the aerodynamic resistance. In Sweden in 2015, there were around 2000 vehicles in operation transporting 6 billion ton-km with an average of 0.025 liter Diesel per ton-km. To understand these vehicles’ aerodynamics, and improve on these in the future, the modelling of the timber stacks is of utmost importance. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations have been utilized to conduct this investigation due to recent advancements and the relatively low cost of these simulations compared to an experimental approach. By investigating the influence of geometrical modifications of the stacks on the flow features and accumulated drag, a generic timber stack was created representative of a real stack for a loaded baseline vehicle. It was found that the shorter log length and a shuffling of the logs in the stack exhibit important flow features contributing to drag not present in the other cases. Based on this, a new baseline loaded truck configuration was created with all stacks being identical to each other. This generic stack was built with logs that were 4.25 m long and 0.35 m in diameter, had a smooth surface, and were stacked with a certain displacement in the lengthwise direction.