Study and Improvement of Drag Coefficient of a Bus

• Main Author: Adi Akmal Bin Nasrul Hisham, Adi Akmal
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Teknologi Petronas 2008
• Subjects: TJ Mechanical engineering and machinery
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/724/1/Adi_Akmal_Bin_Nasrul_Hisham.pdf; http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/724/

As one of the main public transportation, bus is surely essential to peoples that want to travel from one place to another without having to pay much. But as the current design of the body of the bus is not very streamlined, it creates large drag forces. This situation made the operation costs higher and the bus fare also have to be increase to compensate the operation costs. In order to save the usage of fossil fuels, engineers are working to design the vehicles to be more efficient. The main objective of this project is to design the most streamlined body of a bus, so that the fuel efficiency will increase because the drag forces are being reduced. Several shapes will be implemented in the body design of the bus and the design will then be tested using software. From the analysis, it shows that the second modification gives the lowest drag coefficient, which is 0.535. The percentage of reduction for the new shape is 38.86 percent. After the design have been finalized and the drag coefficient is obtained, the design is fabricated and being tested in the wind tunnel. The result of the experiment is 0.574, giving 6.79 percent of difference.