Fluid Dynamic Analysis of Ducati 999 Heat Exchangers by Means of Numerical and Experimental Methodologies

In the present work both a numerical and experimental approach has been adopted in order to evaluate the air-side performances of the Ducati 999 radiators as well as to improve their modeling by means of the commercial CFD code. For this purpose, the results obtained by these investigation methodologies have been compared for several vehicle velocities, going on with the work and the purposes described in ref. [17]. The fundamental features of the heat exchangers behaviour have been found out by both the investigation techniques, although some discrepancy between the results has been revealed. While these differences suggest that an improvement of the numerical model and the measurement technique is needed, it has been demonstrated that they can be successfully employed to estimate the fluid dynamics performances of the heat exchangers.