Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Temperature and Flow Field in a Full Vehicle

Accurate CFD simulation of full vehicle enables vehicle development specialists to gain access to detailed flow and temperature field for the entire vehicle and for arbitrary driving conditions. Information of that nature is invaluable to vehicle development and design since it leads to detailed understanding of the problem areas and pointers to how the design and performance can be improved from the thermal management perspective. Presented are simulations of the vehicle Renault Scenic II cruising at 60 kilometers per hour using PowerFLOW. The simulations were performed using a coupling between the flow solver PowerFLOW and the thermal simulation package PowerTHERM that accounts for conduction and radiation effects. The simulation results were compared with the test data for steady state forced convection case. In order to gauge the accuracy of the simulations, extensive validations were made with thermocouple data and flow measurements. Good agreement was observed between the simulation results and the measurements.