Vehicle Thermal Management investigations
Abstract
In order to comply with the toughening legislation on emissions and make the vehicles more environmentally friendly, there is a large challenge in both academia and industry to push the development towards more energy efficient cars and trucks.
This research project involves several studies that combine aerodynamics and thermal management including developing complex simulation procedures for simulation and evaluation of vehicle brake systems under various testing scenarios as well as studies of the cooling of the engine bays in cars and trucks. These types of studies require accurate predictions not only of the cooling flow and convection coefficients, but also calculations of conduction and radiation heat fluxes.
Experimental investigations of such problems are extremely expensive as they require access to both physical test objects as well as sophisticated wind tunnel facilities. Furthermore, automotive wind tunnel investigations mainly provide force measurements and at best only limited flow information and temperature history at a few discrete points in the system.
Advances of CFD methods enables simulations of such problems and, hence, computational resources are of a high importance for this research project. Coupled aerodynamic and thermal simulations provide not only the detailed information on the air-flow around the parts, but also allow to investigate heat fluxes between the parts and obtain the temperature history of any point in the system. The simulated complex scenarios are transient in its nature and, therefore, relatively large computational resources and access to high performance computer clusters are required.
