THERMAL AND STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF AN AUXILIARY VEHICLE HEATER SYSTEM

摘要

The paper deals with a steady-state thermal analysis and thermo-elastic stress analysis of an auxiliary vehicle heater system using finite element modeling. A detailed FE model has been created for this purpose. The FE model consists of the main parts of the assembly, including a description of thermal and mechanical loads, and contact interaction between its parts and external boundary conditions. The model considers heat transfer coefficients from current literature, which are iteratively corrected to estimate the temperature distribution in the main parts according to the target power of the heater estimated to be around 4kW. The design was developed out using Catia v5 r18, and analysis was carried out using the FE program ANSYS Workbench vl5. The analysis is a very useful step in a concurrent design process of such a device.