Vehicle engine cooling systems: assessment and improvement of wind-tunnel based evaluation methods

摘要

The high complexity of vehicle front-end design, arising from considerations of aerodynamics, safety and styling, causes the airflow velocity profile at the radiator face to be highly distorted, leading to potentially reduced airflow volume for heat dissipation. A flow visualisation study showed that the bumper bar significantly influenced the cooling airflow, leading to three-dimensional vortices in its wake and generating an area of relatively low velocity across at least one third of the radiator core. Since repeatability and accuracy of on-road testing are prejudiced by weather conditions, wind-tunnel testing is often preferred to solve cooling airflow problems. However, there are constraints that limit the accuracy of reproducing on-road cooling performance from wind-tunnel simulations. These constraints included inability to simulate atmospheric conditions, limited tunnel test section sizes (blockage effects) and lack of ground effect simulations. The work presented in this thesis involved use of on-road and wind-tunnel tests to investigate the effects of most common constraints present in wind tunnels on accuracy of the simulations of engine cooling performance and radiator airflow profiles. To aid this investigation, an experimental technique for quantifying radiator airflow velocity distribution and an analytical model for predicting the heat dissipation rate of a radiator were developed. A four-hole dynamic pressure probe (TFI Cobra probe) was also used to document flow fields in proximity to a section of radiator core in a wind tunnel in order to investigate the effect of airflow maldistribution on radiator heat-transfer performance. In order to cope with the inability to simulate ambient temperature, the technique of Specific Dissipation (SD) was used, which had previously been shown to overcome this problem.