The two major areas of engine development, the automobile industry is concentrating and putting its major product development efforts on are emission control and improved fuel efficiency. These developments either directly or indirectly impact the cooling system requirements significantly. A small change in cooling system requires the vehicle to undergo cooling tests before commercial release to make sure it performs as per requirements. Normally, on an average, 4-5 trials are conducted before clearing the vehicle for production. This involves a lot of time, efforts and resources.
The objective of this study is to develop a methodology to predict the cooling system performance analytically and validate the results with experimental data. This study will help in reducing the number of trials thereby saving cost, time and efforts involved. Basic components of cooling system include radiator, charge air cooler and fan. The most important parameters used to validate the analytical results are the Limiting Ambient Temperature (LAT) and charge air cooler outlet temperature. LAT is the maximum ambient temperature at which the vehicle cooling system can work without failure.
The Steady-state analytical calculations have been performed for engine cooling system (Radiator - Charge Air Cooler (CAC) - Fan) combinations using lumped parameter approach and the methodology is validated experimentally. The deviation between the proposed analytical method and test is reasonable. FAN laws are used to evaluate fan performance for different speeds of engine.