| With the raising requirement of emission regulation, intercooler is to be a critical component for diesel vehicle cooling system. The performance of intercooler has significant effect to vehicle power, fuel economy, emission and vehicle durability performance. The requirement from customer to vehicle power and fuel economy is higher than before due to both vehicle and fuel price have raised in near several years. Meanwhile, with the higher requirement from IQA, there are much more challenge in intercooler design and performance validation during all vehicle development.This paper bases on a light truck development background and combines with vehicle marketing, layout and Powertrain requirement to complete intercoolant system design and data criteria set. Meanwhile, we use a ID simulation software called’Flowmaster’to take the simulation study and get out he outlet temperature of intercooler is higher than required for 7.5℃.For this high temperature issue we try to make it improved through many ways, such as change the intercooler position, modify intercooler structure and increase the diameter of fan. Simulation analysis result indicate that change intercooler position has less effect to the temperature of intercooler outlet and engine coolant outlet. The modified structure of intercooler can improve the performance of intercooling performance but due to the limited cost and space, the temperature can be reduced only for 5℃. Finally, we choose to the proposal of increase fan diameter and modify intercooler structure together to achieve the requirement. It can reduce the intercooler outlet temperature to be 27.4℃ and meet performance requirement.To verify the design and optimization result, we take vehicle thermal balance test for further validation. The result indicates that this intercooler design can meet requirement, the largest deviation with software simulation result is 5%. So we get this methodology which is effective and operational for engineer analysis in regular work and significant for intercooling design and investigation. |
