Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Flow and Temperature Fields around Automotive Cooling Systems

The present paper is part of a more comprehensive study concerning the surface flow in the engine compartment and focuses on the fluid flow of a cooling system in a modern vehicle. The complexity of this field needs to further optimization in the integration of 3D CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) methods. An important focus lies on the modeling of radiators and fans. A new simulation method needs to be validated. For this purpose a component test bench was built.

This paper shows the results oft the simulation on the test bench and the CFD analysis. All the fan and radiator model configurations have been studied by means of a commercial CFD package. The comparison of the results gives a better understanding of the total system performance for a faster and more reliable preliminary design.