Search Results

This paper presents pressure drops and heat transfer rates for compact heat exchangers, where the heat exchangers are angled 90°, 60°, 30° and 10° relative to the incoming airflow. The investigation is based on three heat exchangers with thicknesses of 19mm and 52mm. Each heat exchanger was mounted in a duct, where it was tested for thermal and isothermal conditions. The inlet temperature of the coolant was defined to two temperatures; ambient temperature and 90°C. For the ambient cases the coolant had the same temperature as the surrounding air, these tests were performed for five airflow rates. When the coolant had a temperature of 90°C a combination of five coolant flow rates and five airflow rates were tested. The test set-up was defined as having a constant cross-section area for 90°, 60° and 30° angles, resulting in a larger core area and a lower airspeed through the core, for a more inclined heat exchanger.

Quantification of heat exchanger performance in its operative environment is in many engineering applications an essential task, and the air flow rate through the heat exchanger core is an important optimizing parameter. This paper explores an alternative method for quantifying the air flow rate through compact heat exchangers positioned in the underhood of a passenger car. Unlike conventional methods, typically relying on measurements of direct flow characteristics at discrete probe locations, the proposed method is based on the use of load-cells for direct measurement of the total force acting on the heat exchanger. The air flow rate is then calculated from the force measurement. A direct comparison with a conventional pressure based method is presented as both methods are applied on a passenger car’s radiator tested in a full scale wind tunnel using six different grill configurations. The measured air flow rates are presented and discussed over a wide range of test velocities.

Presented are results from numerical investigations of buoyancy driven flow in a simplified representation of an engine bay. A main motivation for this study is the necessity for a valid correlation of results from numerical methods and procedures with physical measurements in order to evaluate the accuracy and feasibility of the available numerical tools for prediction of natural convection. This analysis is based on previously performed PIV and temperature measurements in a controlled physical setup, which reproduced thermal soak conditions in the engine compartment as they occur for a vehicle parked in a quiescent ambient after sustaining high thermal loads. Thermal soak is an important phenomenon in the engine bay primarily driven by natural convection and radiation after there had been a high power demand on the engine. With the cooling fan turned off and in quiescent environment, buoyancy driven convection and radiation are the dominating modes of heat transfer.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is today an important tool in the design process of fuel and energy efficient vehicles. Under-hood management is one of the fields where CFD has proven itself to be useful for cost-efficient development of products. Multiple Reference Frame (MRF) method is the most common used tool in the industry for modeling rotating parts. In previous papers, the modeling strategy with MRF has been documented for open fans and showed high capability to predict fan performance. One of the open points of this proposed method has been its applicability to closed fans (ring fans), as industry experience and discussions has indicated previous conclusions of open fans and MRF modeling may not apply across ranges of fan designs. This paper investigates the MRF method for a closed fan with U-shroud and analyzes several aspect of the modeling strategy.