Simplify Design Modification by Accurate Thermal Simulation of Baking Oven

Baking ovens in the automotive paint shop are crucial to ensuring quality of paint curing and hence meet the corrosion protection targets in manufacturing process. Ovens are also among the most energy consuming processes in the entire paint shop. With the onset of Electric Vehicle revolution, original equipment manufacturers focus heavily on light weighting resulting in significant design changes to the body in white (BIW). This presents a challenge of achieving accurate curing in the existing ovens designed for the current and past generations of vehicles Using Computational fluid dynamics (CFD), this research intends to present a solution by minimizing the need for prototyping for design changes. Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) based thermal simulations are used to predict the curing behaviour on the BIW surface. The LBM based conjugated heat transfer simulations consider turbulence using a Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) approach and Boussinesq approximation. The approach does not need complex preprocessing or mesh generation. Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) based computational modelling allows for easy parallelization to simulate the massive computational domain in an industrially feasible timeline. Meanwhile, dynamic simulations consider real-time conditions inside the oven derived from an upfront design of the heating and cooling regions. Consideration of design changes on the BIW itself, especially for the internal cavities and specific problem regions can be quite time consuming even with CFD simulations. This research specifically focuses on making high fidelity simulations on interested regions of the BIW possible with minimal increase is computational time. This solution will reduce the number of prototypes needed for new designs, and hence minimize the physical resources and time utilized in new car body designs.