The drag of a car is highly dependent on the topology of its complex wake system. Small changes in the shape of the car, that do not have a big effect when considered separately, can lead to significant changes in the total drag when the vortex systems of the changed part of the car body interact with the wake vortices. To understand these interferences, a method is necessary that decomposes the flow based on dynamic information. In this paper, the feasibility of using the Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) to analyze the dynamic behavior of the wake flow of a car is investigated. The DMD is found to extract useful information from the flow when applied to three dimensional velocity vector fields.
The CFD simulations are validated by yet unpublished experimental results from experiments in two different wind tunnels.
