A Numerical Procedure for the Evaluation of the Engine Head-Cylinder Group Cooling Effectiveness

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the thermal flows and heat transfer phenomena occurring in the cooling circuit of a high specific power engine and to suggest a valid method to evaluate its effectiveness in keeping the temperature below a safety limit even in the highest thermal power points. This is a first work showing the analysis of the cooling circuit of a small single-cylinder, four-stroke, high power density gasoline engine carried out with a numerical three-dimensional CFD analysis by means of a CFD conjugate simulation, whose boundary conditions have been taken from a validated one-dimensional fluid dynamic engine model. Once its validity has been assessed by the comparison between the simulation results and data collected by literature and experiments, the interest for this procedure relies on the fact that heat fluxes are directly calculated by the CFD code through the knowledge of gas temperatures and convective heat transfer coefficients. Hence an arbitrary, a priori subdivision of the total heat flux released by fuel combustion into heat converted into mechanical work, heat released to the cooling system, heat rejected to the exhaust, etc. can be avoided; at the same time, the model provides the proper distribution of the heat rejected to the various surfaces constituting the water jackets. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the cooling system is then directly performed in terms of temperature distribution. By this way, once the engine has been designed from a fluid dynamic and mechanical point of view, the effectiveness of the cooling system can be immediately verified through the application of the described procedure. This study takes into consideration the evaluation of average and instantaneous heat transfer coefficient and in-cylinder gas temperature through the use of a validated 1D CFD model, the analysis of the temperature field by means of a conjugate heat transfer simulation of the whole head and cylinder group and an example of the application of this procedure for the evaluation of a simple modification of the cooling system.