Simulation of Split Engine Cooling System

Cooling system is one of the important systems of an engine to maintain the optimum coolant temperature across engine and its components. Analysis of cooling system at initial phase of product development will help in optimum design of the system and there by achieving better performance of engine. For this purpose the traditional method followed is to run several bench tests and to analyze the engine performance and repeat the bench tests for validating any design changes. This results in increased lead time of engine development and overall cost. To reduce the lead time as well as reduce the overall cost, 1D (one dimension) simulation tools place a major role. Simulation of engine cooling system with special kind of engine coolant water jacket is challenging. It is difficult to achieve the simulation results close to bench test due to complexity of the system. This paper aims at predicting the pressure drop and flow rates across different components and locations of engine cooling system with split engine coolant jacket and validating the same with engine test data. This work helps in developing an approach to model cooling system with split engine coolant jacket in 1D modelling tool. As engine coolant jacket is the major contributor of pressure drop in cooling system, its modelling strategy will have high influence on results predictions across the system. This work is bench marking to simulate engine cooling system with special kind of water jacket using 1D simulation. The approach formulated to model cooling system with split engine coolant jacket had achieved good correlation of flows with 10 % error through split cooling system against bench test data.