Feedback Control of an Ahmed Body Flow Exhibiting Symmetry-Breaking Regimes

At motorway speeds two-thirds of usable engine energy of square-back vehicles is spent overcoming the aerodynamic drag. The main source of drag is the bi-stable low pressure wake which forms at the back of the body as the boundary layers separate over the rear edges of the vehicle. Identifying large coherent structures and describing the physics of the wake is, therefore, of great practical importance for understanding the sources of drag and informing drag-reduction strategies. Present work investigates numerically the flow past the Ahmed body - a commonly used test-case for a simplified vehicle geometry, at Reynolds numbers $310