An engine-bay test bed for understanding and modeling of unsteady heat-transfer

Research Project, 2018 – 2021

The application aims at providing tools to enable significant reduction in vehicle cooling drag, up to 50-100% depending on driving conditions and propulsion system. Current practices suffer from a lack of validation data, particularly for transient situations such as vehicle start-stop and soak. The lack of data is a disadvantage for the development of accurate numerics for engine bay design. Accurate CFD tools are crucial for industry to push the limits of energy savings. For this, a test bed will be designed, constructed, and used to measure relevant flow and heat transfer conditions. The facility will include laser diagnostics for flow and temperature field. Later, the data will be correlated to full scale tests and will be used to improve CFD methods. The outcome will give bio-fuel combustion engines and hybrids an experimental and computational platform enabling a engineering design process with significant reduction of the cooling drag and lead time.