Modelling and Validation of a Truck Cooling System

Research Paper-In the future, new challenges will occur during the product development in the vehicular industry when emission legislations getting tighter. This will also affect the truck cooling system and therefore increase the need for analysing the system at different stages of the product development. Volvo 3P wishes for these reasons to examine the possibility to use AMESim as a future 1D analysis tool. This tool can be used as a complement to existing analysis methods at Volvo 3P. It should be possible to simulate pressure, flow and heat transfer both steady state and transient.

In this thesis work a cooling system of a FH31 MD13 520hp truck with an engine driven coolant pump is studied. Further a model of the cooling system is built in AMESim together with necessary auxiliary systems such as oil circuits. The model is validated using experimental data that have been produced by Volvo 3P at the Gothenburg facility. The results from validation and other simulations show that the model gives a good picture of the cooling system. It also gives information about pressure, flow and heat transfer in steady state condition. Further a design modification is done, showing how a change affects the flow in the cooling system. The conclusion is that a truck cooling system can be built and simulated in AMESim. Further, it shows that AMESim meets the requirements Volvo 3P in Gothenburg has set up for the future 1D analysis tool and thereby AMESim is a good complement to the already existing analysis method.


Problem Description-

When a cooling system is designed the engineer must be aware of the different needs there are for each component, which in some sense can be seen as customers of the system. These needs can for example be defined as a flow at a certain engine speed but also a pressure limitation over a defined interval. The engineer must then design a system that can offer each component a flow at a specific pressure that is at least the specified. In order to design the cooling system, different types of analysis are required: both three dimension (3D) and onedimension (1D). For example a 3D analysis can be done using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) which can solve and analyse problems that involve fluid flows. Additional 1D analysis can show if the cooling capacity is enough or how the flow will propagate and distribute around the cooling circuit. This thesis work will only cover 1D analysis and therefore 3D analysis will not be covered in this report. For these types of 1D analysis a number of data tools are available on the market for the analyst. For this thesis work a tool called AMESim has been use for 1D analysis.

There is an increasing need for more analysis including heat transfer in the cooling circuit. Today heat transfer in each component and branch is not included in the analysis because the cooling capacity is enough for the system. In the future however an increasing complexity of the vehicle engine cooling systems in combination with requirements on optimised cooling for different load conditions drive the need for fast and reliable processes for engine heat management simulations. For these reasons a new method in a one-dimension tool are required.

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  • Raj J

    Modelling and Validation of a Truck Cooling System

    3 years ago