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This paper describes the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as a tool to investigate fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics in louvered fin heat exchangers that are widely used in automotive industry. CFD supplies you with information from inside the heat exchanger like spatial distributions of temperature and velocity fields between the fins. The right interpretation of this information can reduce the number of prototypes and thus save time and money in the development process. Variations of grid density, differencing schemes and boundary conditions have been performed in 2D to ensure the reliability of the numerical results. With the recommendations of the 2-D study 3-D calculations have been made. The numerical results show good agreement with experimental data. The experimental values for overall pressure drop and heat transfer have been obtained using a test facility for heat exchangers at Behr.

In this paper a study of different front end and cooling module designs on the engine cooling performance by means of simulation tools is presented. Various configurations of grille and front end intake geometries of a BMW 5 series passenger car are investigated at different operating points concerning mass flow and mass flow distribution on engine cooling components. Different cooling module configurations were studied concerning the position of an additional motor oil cooler. The simulations were done with 1D Behr Integrated System Simulations Software (BISS) as well as the commercial 3D Navier-Stokes solvers UH3D and Star-CD. BISS and CFD software are coupled by passing the results as boundary conditions enabling to use the full potential of both 1D and 3D modeling. Differences between UH3D and Star-CD modeling assumptions are discussed and advantages and disadvantages concerning accuracy and turnaround time are quantified.