Representative Point of Measurement of Engine ECU and Effect of Vortices and Ambient Wall on Forced Air-Cooling

The Electric Control Unit (ECU) is a crucial computing unit responsible for engine regulating various functions. However, non-airflow thermal design due to the complexity of engine bay turbulent flow simulation is limiting ECU’s potential with the increasing demand of computation power consumption, thermal design faced additional challenges. Moreover, the lack of standardized ECU design guidelines forced substantial investments in customized thermal solutions for different engine bay packaging. Through this research, the method of finding representative points of ambient temperature efficiently and reliably is investigated, so that thermal design can be achieved by estimating flow properties during the ECU design stage efficiently. This research involves studying the effects of airflow on ECU cooling using experimental and numerical analysis in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Alongside the representative points of ambient temperature uncovered from the numerical result, experimental results were gathered and used as references to authenticate the findings. In the experiment, this study utilized a wind tunnel and retrieved measurements of the ECU. Advancing from the result, including visualization, and comparison to the simulation result was done to form a complete validation and alignment for CFD. ECU installing positions (0 and 90 degrees), inlet speeds (0 to 2.5m/s), and ambient structure differences were also considered in the research process. As an outcome, understanding and proposing locations around the ECU using velocity measurement representing ECU thermal profile are achieved.