Studying the Efficiency of Different CAE/CFD Methods for Modeling Complex Air-to-Air Heat Exchangers

In this article, the behavior of a typical air-to-air heat exchanger (intercooler) during the thermal shock test has been recorded during which the heat exchanger is exposed to very high temperature gradients. Different CAE models have been built that have different levels of details and the sensitivity of the results to the details has been studied. Finally a comparison have been made between the results of the CAE/CFD model and the experimental data and the correlation study shows that in spite of being simple, the dual stream is very accurate and correlates pretty well with test data. Including all design details in the CAE model will not necessarily improve the accuracy of the model while adding up to the computational cost.