Computational simulation methods for vehicle thermal management

Abstract

Increasing power requirements along with weight and space constrains requires implementation of more intelligent thermal management systems. The design and development of such systems can only be possible with a thorough understanding of component and system level thermal loads. The present work implements 1-D and 3-D unsteady CFD based simulation tools in a military ground vehicle design process. Both powertrain cooling and HVAC systems are simulated in various operating conditions on a HPC Computer Cluster using multiple fidelity tools. HVAC system variables are optimized with gradient based optimization libraries. The simulation results are compared and validated with experimental tests. © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.