Experimental Validation of Passenger Car Underhood Simulation in the Presence of Convective and Radiative Heat Flux Available to Purchase

The numerical prediction of underhood local temperatures represents a challenging field in the development of passenger cars. The reliability of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results is depending upon numerics and employing appropriate physical models which can strongly affect the quality of results and the overall simulation time. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and validate the simulation of heat transfer phenomena in a vehicle’s underbody through the comparison with experimental data. The measurements are obtained from thermal sensors mounted on a passenger car during a highway drive. Furthermore, the radiative boundary conditions are defined through the post-processing of thermographic camera images. The numerical results of a commercial CFD code are finally compared with the experimental data on surface temperatures of the vehicle’s underbody.