Search Results

Requirement for more compact and more efficient fan systems to improve the automotive thermal management has urged Valeo to develop a complete automatic CFD procedure to numerically simulate the fan system. The present study has focused on the description and the validation of the flexible grid template that is meant to simulate the internal flow field within the fan system. This template closely fits in the previously developed rotor-stator parametric grid. The initial small rib reference design has been meshed and four different large rib cases with increasing geometrical difficulties have helped testing this new capability. The simulations have been performed on a medium size grid that has been shown to capture most of the important flow features. The ribs act as centrifugal pumps that drain airflow through the electrical motor. Larger ribs are shown to increase the flow rate through the motor by up to 25% with a marginal increase with swept ribs compared to radial ones.

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.