Underhood Airflow Simulation of a Passenger Car Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

This paper describes an analytical method developed to aid the project of vehicles, aiming to obtain a good performance of the engine cooling system, air-conditioning and thermal behavior of components that are exposed to severe operating conditions. A commercial code of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) is used as the analysis tool to solve the flow through the underhood by the finite-volume method. The methodology is presented with an application for a passenger car, comparing the results obtained by the simulation with experimental data.