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Internal combustion engine gets heated up due to continuous combustion of fuel. To keep engine working efficiently and prevent components damage due to very high temperature, the engine needs to be cooled down. Based on power output requirement and provision for cooling system, every engine has it’s unique cooling system. Liquid based cooling systems are majorly implemented in automobile. It’s important to keep in mind that during design phase that, cooling the engine will lower the power to fuel consumption ratio. Therefore, during lower ambient conditions, the cooling system should be able to uniformly increase the temperature of the engine components, engine oil and transmission oil. This is achieved by circulating the coolant through cooling jacket, engine oil heater and transmission oil heater, which will be heated by the combustion heat.

Improving fuel economy and to satisfy more stringent emission legislations the Vehicle electrification becomes more important one. Compared to the combustion engine an electric vehicle will use energy from the grid to recharge their HV battery and this is converted with much higher efficiency and less CO2 emission. This makes a significant role in the present transition from conventional to electric vehicles. The addition of new components, such as power electronics, electric machine and HV battery, increases the torque availability, energy but also the weight. In addition, although they have really high efficiency, they produce a significant amount of heat that has to be removed. Another thermal management issue in PHEV and BEV is cabin heating, since the engine heat is not available. To guarantee system efficiency and reliability, a completely new thermal management layout has to be designed.

In today’s automobile industries to improve the fuel economy lots of weight reduced in all the systems of the vehicle, particularly in the engine cooling system. Due to the lighter weight engine cooling systems, the vehicles might face many temperature challenges and sustainability issues. The automotive cooling system has unrealized potential to improve internal combustion engine performance through enhanced coolant temperature control and reduced parasitic losses. The idea of this work is to validate the downsized heat exchanger to use in an optimal engine cooling module without compromising the functional requirements. For this study a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) engine internal cooling system is modelled in GT-SUITE®. The PHEV cooling network comprises of high temperature (HT) loop, low temperature loop (LT) loop and the battery loop.

The performance of the Transmission Oil Cooler (TOC) is influenced significantly by the TOC plumbing lines which transmit the oil from transmission system to the oil cooler and back. Designing the optimum TOC plumbing line with lesser pressure drop is the need of the hour considering the complex nature of the vehicle packaging. Reducing the pressure drop increases the oil flow rate through the transmission which results in optimum performance. Improved transmission efficiency in turn shall improve the engine efficiency and performance. The improvements obtained from increased transmission and engine efficiency shall result in an overall increase in vehicle fuel economy. Optimization solutions are required in the early product development cycle where the components are not readily available and/or are prohibitively expensive to do testing. In such scenarios, one-dimensional (1D) simulations shall be employed to compute the pressure drop for faster and economical solutions.