Transient thermal management simulations of complete heavy-duty vehicles

Transient vehicle thermal management simulations have the potential to be an important tool to ensure long component lifetimes in heavy-duty vehicles, as well as save development costs by reducing development time. Time-resolved computational fluid dynamics simulations of complete vehicles are however typically very computationally expensive, and approximation methods must be employed to keep computational costs and turn-around times at a reasonable level. In this thesis, two transient methods are used to simulate two important time-dependent scenarios for complete vehicles; hot shutdowns and long dynamic drive cycles. An approach using a time scaling between fluid solver and thermal solver is evaluated for a short drive cycle and heat soak. A quasi-transient method, utilizing limited steady-state computational fluid dynamics data repeatedly, is used for a long drive cycle. The simulation results are validated and compared with measurements from a climatic wind tunnel. The results indicate that the time-scaling approach is appropriate when boundary conditions are not changing rapidly. Heat-soak simulations show reasonable agreement between three cases with different thermal scale factors. The quasi-transient simulations suggest that complete vehicle simulations for durations of more than one hour are feasible. The quasi-transient results partly agree with measurements, although more component temperature measurements are required to fully validate the method