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Degas bottles have been extensively used in vehicles in order to act as an air pillow on top of the cooling loop and provide space for expansion. One of the important characteristics of the bottle which defines if it will work in a certain loop is the so called “capacity” of the bottle which defines the flowrate that degas bottle would be able to pass through without any foaming. Considering the complex geometry of degas bottle and the foaming phenomena, predicting the behavior of coolant in the bottle passages is challenging which requires costly tests. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been extensively used in simulating multi-phase flows in automotive components. In the current project, CFD has been used to simulate the behavior of flow in bottle chambers and to provide guidelines for the design team in order to increase the bottle performance/capacity. The CFD guidelines were in agreement with test results and lead to improving the degas bottle capacity.

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.