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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.

Automotive fuel and emission regulations are becoming stringent decade over decade. These regulations are expected to be even more strict in future to control global warming, associated health issues and conserve energy. Automobile industries find it difficult to meet these regulations during the homologation cycle i.e. NEDC (New European Drive Cycle). Experiments and research indicated that engine structural parts achieve steady-state near end of the homologation cycle; which lead to account cold start effects as well during testing. Also, studies have proved that thermal efficiency of an IC engine is severely affected in cold start condition due to higher friction losses, incomplete combustion and their allied effects. Oil and coolant temperature helps in diminishing mechanical losses and achieving complete combustion. Hence, an effective distribution of combustion and friction heat during a cold start period is of utmost importance.

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.

An expansion tank is an integral part of an automotive engine cooling system. The primary function of the expansion tank is to allow the thermal expansion of the coolant. The expansion tank will be referred as hot bottle in this paper. In the System level modeling of the engine internal flow, it is imperative to accurately model and characterize the components in the system. It is often challenging to define the hot bottle accurately with limited parameters in the 1D modeling. Currently it is very difficult to optimize the system by testing. Since testing consumes a lot of time and changes in development stage. If the hot bottle component is not defined properly in the system network, then the system flow balancing cannot be predicted accurately. In this paper, the approach of creating a 1D modeling tool for hot bottle flow prediction is discussed and the simulation results are compared with the physical test data.