An innovative approach to race track simulations for vehicle thermal management

Within the pre-development phase of a vehicle validation process, the role of computational simulation is becoming increasingly prominent in efforts to ensure thermal safety. This gain in popularity has resulted from the cost and time advantages that simulation has compared to experimental testing. Additionally many of these early concepts cannot be validated through experimental means due to the lack of hardware, and must be evaluated via numerical methods. The Race Track Simulation (RTS) can be considered as the final frontier for vehicle thermal management techniques, and to date no coherent method has been published which provides an efficient means of numerically modeling the temperature behavior of components without the dependency on statistical experimental data. The following investigation will explore an innovative methodology which utilizes a conventional method of simulation whilst integrating multiple 3-Dimensional CFD solutions which are interpolated to match a derived moving average profile. New meshing techniques in combination with the integrated use of a 1-Dimensional transient exhaust prediction tool facilitate higher turn-around times for dynamic vehicle conditions. The experimental data consisted of a test vehicle conducting several laps through the Nuerburg-ring whilst acquiring temperature data on a wide range of underbody components. Excluding the warm-up phase, a single lap simulation was conducted to evaluate the proposed methodology. A fair correlation was achieved between the simulation results and experimental data considering the time advantages of the methodology. Areas of discrepancy can be accounted for by the proposed 1-way coupling scheme and overcompensation of the component temperatures within CFD models.