Simulation-Driven Approach to Design & Evaluate Vehicle Thermal Management 2018-01-1183

In today’s automobile industries to improve the fuel economy lots of weight reduced in all the systems of the vehicle, particularly in the engine cooling system. Due to the lighter weight engine cooling systems, the vehicles might face many temperature challenges and sustainability issues. The automotive cooling system has unrealized potential to improve internal combustion engine performance through enhanced coolant temperature control and reduced parasitic losses. The idea of this work is to validate the downsized heat exchanger to use in an optimal engine cooling module without compromising the functional requirements. For this study a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) engine internal cooling system is modelled in GT-SUITE®^. The PHEV cooling network comprises of high temperature (HT) loop, low temperature loop (LT) loop and the battery loop. Flow networks converted and imported from GEM3D® and advanced features available for fast modelling is used for developing the complex 1D engine cooling system in GT-SUITE®.1D tool KULI® is used for optimizing and validating the design proposal. Transient simulation is performed for an extreme ambient thermal test cycle. The coolant flow rates across the heat exchanger, other cooling system components and the temperature profile across the engine is measured and correlated with the vehicle test results. The results obtained from the proposed design correlates well with the test results. This methodology provides a pre-developed cooling module design at the early stage of product development. Overall it also ensures a system level technical cost reduction.