Research On Automotive Compact Cooling System

with the advent of energy crisis, environment issues getting more attention and more concerns about the problem of fuel consumption, the automobile emission regulations are also more and more strictly. With the improvement of living standards, consumers put forward higher demand on the vehicle comfort.The engine cooling system mainly composed by the condenser, radiator, cooling fan, thermostat and various pipes, and it’s cooling performance will affect the vehicle comfort, reliability, economy and emission directly. The improvement of comprehensive performance and heat load put forward higher requests to the reliability of the cooling system, power consumption and structure compactness. In the development of high efficient compact cooling system, the engine thermal management technology will be used to study the compact cooling system by seeing the engine thermal management system as a whole one. And this is the main content of the study. Based on the test and numerical simulation method, the flow and heat transfer problems in the compact cooling system are discussed systematic and deeply which aimed at looking for theory basis to the optimization of the compact cooling system. Main contents of the study as follows:(1) Porous media simplified to the condenser and radiator core. Equality the cooling fan performance using the experimental value. Construct a3D simulation model of condenser, radiator and cooling fan. And study the compact cooling system by seeing the engine thermal management system as a whole one combined with Flowmaster software platform. Fluid flow and temperature parameters were obtained and offered to STAR-CCM+as input boundary conditions for3D simulation analysis of flow and heat transfer.(2) The wind tunnel test was done to the compact cooling system, cleared the arrangement of sensors and collected relevant test data for the simulation analysis, which provided basis for verification.(3) Study the three improvement programs of the compact cooling system, and evacuate the advantages and disadvantages of them. The thickness of condenser, radiator and cooling fan reduced by16.29%when the cooling conditions remain unchanged, which saved a space for engine compartment in the x direction. Therefore, the method of using engine thermal management technology to study the compact cooling system by seeing the engine thermal management system as a whole one is feasible. The results show that the simulation results and experimental data trend are in good agreement. And this simulation model can study the flow and heat transfer performance of compact cooling system effectively and in favor of shorten the design cycle and reduce the cost of design.