16,052 research outputs found

    Numerical Prediction of Automotive Underhood Airflows using an Uncalibrated Fan Body Force Model

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    Underhood vehicle airflow simulations are an important part of the overall vehicle thermal management process, especially in the preliminary stages of the vehicle development program when performing experimental work on cooling system prototypes can prove to be expensive, time-consuming, or simply impossible due to the absence of any physical vehicle prototypes. Accurate prediction of the automotive fan performance, which forms a critical component of the cooling module, is a prerequisite for the optimum sizing and design of heat exchangers, and the rest of the under-hood installations. The coupled and complex nature of the under-hood flow environment necessitates consideration of the entire front-end cooling module, and preferably the entire vehicle, in a single simulation to judge the fan performance. Direct modelling of the rotating fan blades in a full vehicle simulation can yield unacceptably long run times, hence the norm is to use simplified numerical models which can capture the general fan behaviour at a reduced cost. Industrial practice is to calibrate these fan models with experimental or high-fidelity simulated fan performance data, which slows down the design process and is expensive. This work solves this problem by using an uncalibrated body force fan modelling approach, which only requires fan geometry information and no a-priori fan performance data. The approach has previously shown promising results for aircraft engine fan applications, however it’s suitability for automotive fan applications is tested for the first time. The model performs with a comparable accuracy as the current state-of-the-art calibrated fan modelling techniques. It predicts the radiator airflow rate to within 8% of the experimentally-measured value at idle. At high vehicle speed, the accuracy improves to 1%. Success in this project facilitates a low-cost, reliable and rapid aerothermal analysis tool for designing vehicle cooling systems

    Screening of energy efficient technologies for industrial buildings' retrofit

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    This chapter discusses screening of energy efficient technologies for industrial buildings' retrofit

    Poly Pelletizer: Recycled Pet Pellets From Water Bottles

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    Plastic water bottles comprise a large amount of waste worldwide. The goal of the Poly Pelletizer project is to create a system that will turn water bottles into polyethylene terephthalate (PET) pellets compatible with extruders to produce 3-D printer lament, along with other recycling applications.The system promotes a sustainable solution to plastic pollution by giving manufactures, particularly in developing nations, the means to produce their own bulk materials using waste plastic. Shrinking industrial recycling processes to a workbench scale gives individuals the ability to convert excess bottles into seemingly limitless products. The system works by using a dual heating and pressure system to both evenly mix and melt the plastic before pushing the resin through a die. The Poly Pelletizer successfully created pellets using various mixtures of virgin PET and shredded water bottles

    Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 352)

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    This bibliography lists 147 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during July 1991. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

    Modelling and Co-simulation of hybrid vehicles: A thermal management perspective

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    Thermal management plays a vital role in the modern vehicle design and delivery. It enables the thermal analysis and optimisation of energy distribution to improve performance, increase efficiency and reduce emissions. Due to the complexity of the overall vehicle system, it is necessary to use a combination of simulation tools. Therefore, the co-simulation is at the centre of the design and analysis of electric, hybrid vehicles. For a holistic vehicle simulation to be realized, the simulation environment must support many physical domains. In this paper, a wide variety of system designs for modelling vehicle thermal performance are reviewed, providing an overview of necessary considerations for developing a cost-effective tool to evaluate fuel consumption and emissions across dynamic drive-cycles and under a range of weather conditions. The virtual models reviewed in this paper provide tools for component-level, system-level and control design, analysis, and optimisation. This paper concerns the latest techniques for an overall vehicle model development and software integration of multi-domain subsystems from a thermal management view and discusses the challenges presented for future studies

    Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 324)

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    This bibliography lists 200 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during May, 1989. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

    CFD ANALYSIS OF THE UNDER HOOD OF A CAR FOR PACKAGING CONSIDERATIONS

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    In recent years, there has been an increase in demand towards the improvement of car design for achieving better performance and increasing passenger comfort. Improving the design of individual components to meet the customer needs for improved vehicle performance alone is not enough. Interactions of these components with the surrounding components and their placement should also be investigated. Placement of these components in the under hood space forms a 3-Dimensional packaging problem. In the past, a multi objective optimization process was setup to determine the optimal placement of these components in the car under hood space. Three main objectives were taken into account namely, minimizing center of gravity height, maximizing vehicle maintainability and maximizing survivability in the optimization process. However, minimizing the overall under hood temperature and ensuring the temperature of heat sensitive components to be below its critical value, is not added as an objective to the optimization problem. This study makes an assessment of the need for including the thermal objective into the optimization process and also presents an efficient way of performing CFD simulation over the under hood geometry. The under hood geometry used included radiator, engine, exhaust manifold, coolant tank, air filter, brake booster, front grille geometry and battery. These components were included as heat source, heat exchangers etc. A standard k-É› turbulence model with upward differencing convection scheme is used on a well refined computational mesh. The work also describes in detail the way of accurately and effectively modeling the radiator as an ungrouped macro heat exchanger model available in Ansys FLUENT. The results obtained from the CFD simulations illustrate the importance of the under hood vehicle configuration optimization process on its thermal behavior. The temperature attained by the coolant flowing through the radiator with constant heat rejection, when placed behind the engine is very high, when compared to the temperature it attained with the radiator placed in front of the engine. The CFD analysis presented in this study is performed using Ansys FLUENT while the initial geometry preparation is done using SolidWorks. The CFD analysis presented in this work is then used to build an approximation by my research mate, which is later tied to an optimizer based on Genetic Algorithm. Thus, including the thermal objective to the multi objective optimization problem stated above
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