Toward design and fabrication of wind-driven vehicles: Procedure to optimize the threshold of driving forces

Therefore in order to bypass the wind tunnel measurements, this study aims to propose a fast and economical procedure to find the aforementioned drag coefficient by integration of a measurement and by a simulation approach. The obtained data can be later used in the optimization and control module of the WTS. The performance of this procedure has been investigated using a case study. For this purpose, a 1:4 prototype three-wheel land-yacht is first designed and fabricated. The land-yacht comprises of three major parts; horizontal airfoil (axle), vertical airfoil, and body. The dimensions of these elements are obtained after development of a code based on kinematics of the land-yacht. The axle is designed to increase the stability of the land-yacht, whereas the shape of the body is intended to produce a low drag coefficient in various directions. Furthermore, a set of experiments has been conducted to measure the body drag of the land-yacht in a direction parallel to the relative wind. This experiment is later used to develop and validate a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model in order to estimate the drag of the land-yacht body in its various directions against the relative wind. The results show the adequate efficacy of this procedure to provide the required data for the optimization and control module of the WTS.