A New Approach to Improving Fuel Economy and Performance Prediction through Coupled Thermal Systems Simulation

Vehicle designers make use of vehicle performance programs such as RAPTOR™ to predict the performance of concept vehicles over ranges of industry standard drive cycles. However, the accuracy of such predictions may be greatly influenced by factors requiring more specialist simulation capabilities. For example, fuel economy prediction will be heavily influenced by the performance of the engine cooling system and its impact on the vehicle's aerodynamic drag, and the load from the air-conditioning system.

To improve the predictions, specialist simulation capabilities need to be applied to these aspects, and brought together with the vehicle performance calculations through co-simulation.

This paper describes the approach used to enable this cosimulation and the benefits achieved by the vehicle designer.