Latest Improvements of CFD Models of Engine Cooling Axial Fan Systems

Requirement for more compact and more efficient fan systems to improve the automotive thermal management has urged Valeo to develop a complete automatic CFD procedure to numerically simulate the fan system. The present study has focused on the description and the validation of the flexible grid template used for the rotor-stator configurations. Three different efficient stators with increasing geometrical difficulties have helped testing this new capability. Grid refinement has been assessed and comparisons have been made between the initial stand-alone rotor and the same rotor with the three different stator designs. The simulations have been performed on a reasonable grid size that has been shown to capture most of the important flow features. The efficiency improvement brought by these stators has been clearly highlighted and estimated to be about 10%.