Author(s)

FRANCO CONCLI, MASSIMILIANO GOBBI, CARLO GORLA

Abstract

In motorcycle competitions, aerodynamics play a fundamental role. In order to improve the performance of racing motorbikes, different front-wheel geometries have been studied by means of numerical CFD simulations. Different lean angles were analysed for each geometry and the air motionfield were calculated. The considered geometries range from standard spoked design to solid wheels. Both steady-state and dynamic simulations were run using the open-source free software OpenFOAM^®. This open-source code was selected because, like all the computer programs of this type, it allows a higher flexibility with respect to any close-source commercial software, allowing a customization of the code by implementing specific models for the analysis of the physical problem of interest and also, at the same time, a higher parallelization of the computations. Steady-state simulations were performed using a rotating reference frame (MRF) while, for the transients, a partially-rotating mesh was adopted, thus taking advantage of the internal sliding interfaces (AMI). Drag, lift and force-moments have been calculated with the aim of examining the stability and manoeuvrability of the different configurations.

Keywords

CFD, MRF, AMI, MotoGP, wheel, performances, OpenFOAM^®