The Use of Flow Visualization and Computational Fluid Mechanics in Cylinder Head Cooling Jacket Development

The complementary use of flow visualization and computational fluid mechanics has been demonstrated for the development of cylinder head cooling jackets. Flow visualization was shown to allow the detailed characterization of fluid flow through the complex geometry of a cooling jacket. The use of high speed photography further aided in visualizing the details of the flow, and was used to quantify local fluid velocities. Computationally modeling portions of the cooling jacket allowed the extension of the flow visualization results to the fluid conditions of an operating engine. The computational model also provided an effective tool to assess the impact of modifications to the cooling jackets, without the complexity of modifying the flow visualization test rig for each iteration.