Heat Dissipation Research And Structure Improvement Of A Commercial Vehicle Engine Compartment

Aerodynamic characteristic is an important performance of the car. Along withthe development and progress of automotive technology, aerodynamic has been widelyused in automotive development, analyzing their wind resistance, heat emission, ride&handling, comfort, etc., under complicated driving conditions, especially the coolingproblems of the engine compartment are receiving more concerns in recent years. Thisarticle uses computational fluid dynamics method to analyze the flow and temperaturefields of a DFCV vehicle engine compartment which is suffering from heating anomaly,and to identify the influence factors, raises some improvements without changing thefront-end open area, successfully resolve high local temperature of the radiator.The main contents of this paper include the following: use a3D modelingsoftware to build up a simple whole vehicle CAD model including the vehicle’s enginecompartment, and a Fluent pre-processing software to hatch out its CFD model; choose,use the lab test results to verify reliability of the CFD model under a certain runningcondition; then use this verified model to do simulation work for the DFCV vehicleunder thermal abnormal conditions, analyze and identify the impact of enginecompartment cooling and air flow, provide feasible improvements in the enginecompartment structure design and package; at last, numerically calculate and comparefor each of the improvements, verify effectiveness of every change on both improvingengine compartment ventilation and reducing cooling module temperature.The results can provide a reference in structural improvements and developmentfor subsequent vehicles, shorten the developing time.