Thermal behaviour of a SUV car with a fully coupled 3D-CFD CHT simulation

Abstract

This paper presents a fully coupled thermal 3D-CFD RANS simulation of a comprehensive and fully detailed car model for the Honda CR-V SUV model. The simulation mainly focuses on the thermal aspects within the underhood of the car. All relevant sources of heat are taken into account, including the engine, the exhaust system, the radiator and condenser, as well as the fans attached to it. The definition of the adjacent mesh blocks and the corresponding interfaces is done automatically by the unstructured meshing tool, which reduces significantly the engineering time required to set up the computation. The new meshing approach also ensures conformal connections between all blocks, thus eliminating inaccuracies typically caused by the interpolation due to non-matching block connections. To model the surface-to-surface radiation, a formulation based on the radiosity equation is chosen and implemented in the CFD code. The simulation has been conducted on different meshes with up to 400 million Cells.