Implementation, Validation, and Evaluation of 1D-3D CFD Co-simulation for Cooling System of Internal Combustion Engine

Abstract: Internal combustion engines, electric motors and batteries generate a significant amount of heat during operation that needs to be extracted by cooling systems. A cooling system is designed and installed to extract the generated heat and maintain the system temperature in an optimal range. Overheating has several unfavorable outcomes such as less durability and lower energy efficiency. The cooling system consists of several components such as hoses, flow splitters, valves, heat exchangers, coolant, pump, etc. The coolant, as the working fluid, is pumped to different heat generator component to enable the cooling down process. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a powerful and cost efficient tool to simulate the cooling processes, design, and evaluate the performance of a cooling system. Generally, one dimensional CFD is a common approach to interpret and explain the cooling processes in the automotive industry due to its high flexibility and computational cost efficiency. Also, three dimensional CFD is employed whenever it is required to study complex physical phenomena and provide detailed information. Additionally, it is possible to couple one dimensional and three dimensional CFD approaches to simulate cooling processes. Not only is the coupled 1D-3D CFD approach able to capture complicated physical processes but also is flexible and cost efficient. The objective of this master thesis is to implement 1D-3D CFD coupled simulation on internal combustion engines’ cooling system and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of this method. The performance of this method is examined in different case studies with different flow and geometrical characteristics. The effect of various turbulence models and numerical settings are investigated on the quality of the coupled simulations’ results. The coupled simulations are carried out using GT-SUITE and STAR-CCM+ software. The performed simulations show that the coupling method is a convenient approach which is able to capture detailed physics with high precision requiring reasonable computational costs. The results of the coupled simulations depict agreement with the uncoupled 1D CFD simulations, although some discrepancies are observed in complex case studies. Also, it is shown that the coupled simulations are sensitive to numerical settings and physical models, consequently, the case setup should be optimized carefully.