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Applied Thermal Engineering xxx (2008) xxxxxx www.elsevier.com/locate/apthermeng

A numerical analysis for the cooling module related to automobile air-conditioning system
Hak Jun Kim *, Charn-Jung Kim
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, San 56-1, Shilim-dong, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 151-744, South Korea Received 19 September 2007; accepted 3 December 2007

Abstract The main objective of this paper is to develop a 3D CFD program which can be used by the development engineer to analyze the performance of the vehicle cooling system. There is a demand for new vehicles to be made in shorter product development cycles while continuously improving the vehicles performance and quality. These demands accelerate the use of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools for vehicle test simulations. For engine cooling, it is very important to use CFD tools for the prediction of front end airow pattern. However, the geometry of a vehicles front end and underbody region are extremely complex. From this study, the performance of the automotive cooling system can be predicted and also compared with experimental data. That is, a method to predict the coolant inlet temperature of the radiator is presented. This method includes predicting the coolant and air ow patterns in front of the condenser and radiator in a real vehicle model. This method employed the SIMPLE and SIP numerical methods to solve the NavierStokes equations for incompressible and three-dimensional uid motion. The standard ke turbulence model was applied and the law of wall was applied to the wall boundary. For the validation of the developed method, numerous simulations were completed in accordance with various conditions and the results were compared with existing experimental data. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Vehicle cooling system; SIP; Validation; Coolant inlet temperature; CFD

1. Introduction Within the automotive industry, the subject of vehicle design is moving rapidly into the use of newer and stateof-the-art techniques. The purpose of a vehicle cooling system is to ensure that the engine is maintained at its most ecient practical operating temperature. The trend for todays product development process is to continuously reduce the time-to-delivery and the number of physical tests. The goal of using CAE is to accurately predict the vehicle cooling system before the component/system are built.

Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 2 880 1656; fax: +82 2 883 0179. E-mail addresses: hjkim99@snu.ac.kr (H.J. Kim), kimcj@snu.ac.kr (C.-J. Kim). 1359-4311/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2007.12.002

The cooling airow in todays vehicle engine cooling systems is generated by a ram eect resulting from the vehicles motion and suction produced by fan operation. This airow passes through the grille, condenser, radiator, cooling fan, and other components, removing the rejected heat to the surrounding environment. It is well known, both theoretically and experimentally, that the ow rate and temperature of the air in front of the radiator have a strong inuence on the heat dissipation capacity of the radiator and on the performance of the cooling system. Therefore, the airow is an essential factor aecting the engine cooling system performance and has always been of primary concern in the engine cooling system design. Due to the complex ow pattern and the interactive factors that inuence the ow behavior, the analytical and experimental study of cooling airow is challenging.

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Fig. 1. (a) The schematic conguration of cooling module and the air ow pattern in the engine room of vehicle. (b) The pressure drop and up depend on the function of each component.

Fig. 1 shows the air coming through grille and into the cooling system. There are corresponding pressure drops and rises as the air progresses through each component. Ideally, the predicted ram air eect would be computed using a commercial CFD program instead of experimental test. Of course, the validation of the CFD results should be done before using the commercial CFD program. A number of CFD vendors provide the capability for front end simulations coupled with one-dimensional cooling performance. Some one-dimensional cooling performance codes, such as KULI, can also be used to integrate three-dimensional CFD. With KULI-CFD, the integration is possible using the non-uniform air ow distribution on heat exchangers while utilizing the cooling air velocity distribution on the heat exchanger calculated by the CFD analysis. The results of the CFD are transferred to KULI, and it calculates the coolant inlet temperature [1]. In a similar study, Bernhards results show the heat exchanger program can be directly coupled with an under hood ow simulation by using a user dened subroutine in Star-CD [2]. Another paper showed that the coolant inlet temperature of the radiator obtained with CFD was within 4 C of the experimental data, the dierences being

dependent on the car speed. [3]. But these methods required engineers to have substantial experience using the commercial CFD codes and the meshing software. Sakai showed one example of cooling system optimized by utilizing computer simulation in the early development stage. A numerical simulation was conducted to obtain the airow rate through the engine compartment room by the software STREAM. The optimization of this system was conducted utilizing a design of experiment study for cost saving and weight reduction. The test value correlated well with the calculated one and the CAE was conrmed to be very helpful for saving prototype cost and time [4]. Also Moat introduced a method to couple 1D and 3D CFD models for the prediction of transient hydraulics in engine cooling circuits [5]. In general, the solution of automotive cooling hydraulic networks required the construction of two separate models. Initially, a 3D CFD model was required to predict airow patterns through the bumper apertures. The results were then fed into 1D hydraulic model. The 1D model was then used to predict engine coolant temperatures using either measured or predicted results for heat exchanger performance and calculated radiator coolant ow rates. Predicting transient temperature and ow rates within a circuit for a single drive cycle, vehicle speed and engine load continuously changing, can become extremely time consuming. This study described a technique for coupling the two methodologies in a manner that eliminated the need for repeatedly calculating 3D solutions for every vehicle operating condition. The modeling approach was easily extendable to predict the eects of variations in any of the cooling system component strategies. Jansen showed another method of using the LatticeBoltzmann method to solve the engine cooling system. Lattice-Boltzmann equation (LBE) solvers represented an alternative to the NavierStokes solvers. They did not need any special iterative procedures to satisfy mass, momentum, and energy conservation. This paper showed the LBE solvers are numerically very ecient and robust. The increased numerical eciency allowed handling of matrices with a very large number of elements and the properties of the Boltzmann equation allowed an improved treatment of the uid ow interaction with the wall surface. Also presented were cooling airow and external aerodynamic simulations of a Land Rover LR3 and Ford Mondeo under several driving conditions [6]. Nicolas Francois showed the Fluent CFD software to be a fast and cost eective tool and increasingly utilized at different stages of heat exchanger design optimization. A few highlighted examples showed CFD analysis improving the design of radiator, condenser and cooling system performance in the vehicles underhood region but did not disclose the detail of the simulation or the test data [7]. The method presented in this study aids automotive engineers in the design of cooling module with a reliable CFD data. The method is simple and only requires

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combining the computational domain with a specially developed automotive cooling module to calculate the CFD solution. 2. Mathematical method, modeling and solving 2.1. Governing equations To solve the complicated physical phenomena corresponding to the complex geometry of the vehicle and cooling system model, there are necessary requirements. A simple coordinate system for stable solving is needed. Additionally, a special method dening the relation of the computational domain to the simple coordinate system and the complex geometry is also necessary. Generally, the testing of the engine cooling module is completed when the coolant inlet temperature of the radiator varies little over the time of test. Therefore, this study used the steady state continuity, momentum equations as follows because it was unnecessary to solve the transient equations: continuity equation oqui 0 oxi x, y, z momentum equations   oquk uj op o ouj l Sj oxk oxj oxi oxi 1

lt qC l

  oquk k o lt ok G qe oxk oxj rk oxj   e oquk e o le oe C 1e G C 2e qe oxk oxj re oxj k C l 0:09; rk 1:00; re 1:30; C 1e 1:44; C 2e 1:92

k2 e

5 6

A basic wall function equation for the velocity parallel to the wall was applied. The logarithmic law of the wall equation is given as u 1 lnEy j 7

In this formula, j is von Karmans constant (0.4187) and E is an integration constant that depends on the roughness of the wall. For smooth walls with constant shear stress, E has a value of 9.0. 2.3. The computational domain and complex geometry Fig. 2 shows the vehicle model used in this study. The model was created considering the real vehicle shape (the

In the above equations, the stress tensor term split so that a portion of the normal stress appears in the diusion term, and the rest is contained in Sj      o oui 2 o ouk S j fj l l 3 S source oxj 3 oxj oxi oxk energy (temperature) equation   oquk T o j oT ST oxk oxj C p oxj

2.2. Turbulence model and wall function When the ow is turbulent the solution variables may be divided into a time averaged value and its instantaneous component. For example the instantaneous velocity may be represented as U + u0 , its mean and uctuating values respectively. However as we are usually interested in the mean values rather than a uctuating value. For most engineering purposes, it is unnecessary to resolve the details of the turbulent uctuations. Therefore, the standard two equation ke model was applied to the study.

Fig. 2. Vehicle model used in the simulation and the front view showing the carrier, bumper frame, condenser, radiator and fan.

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overall length of vehicle: 4800 mm, the full width of vehicle: 1830 mm, the overall height of vehicle: 1475 mm) and consists of the exterior of the vehicle, engine block, engine environmental block, carrier part, wheels, radiator, condenser and fan. The grille opening area was the same as the vehicle. The heat exchangers (i.e. condenser and radiator) also had the same dimension as the real components. The process for preparing the data input related to the geometries for calculation was as follows: Step (1) Prepare the complex vehicle geometry from CAD or other special in-house geometry program and make the tetra mesh using Hypermesh or another pre-processing tool. Step (2) Make the computational domain with non-uniform orthogonal grids well matched with the range of all complex geometries.Fig. 3 shows the computational domain merged with the tetra geometry of the vehicle model. Each cell in the domain that is intersected by tetra surfaces will have the available area occupied by the air calculated by the in-house program. Step (3) Each grid cell is intersected by the tetra mesh of geometry. The in-house rst program developed through this study calculates the surface number and connectivity for each cell and sorts the unique surface numbers and saves the result. That is, through using a special in-house algorithm, each cell surface which is in contact with the tetra surfaces is determined. Step (4) The in-house second program automatically calculates the open area of each cell with the above result data, refer to Fig. 4. It takes approximately 1 h to calculate the open area of all cells using an HP C8000 machine (4G RAM). In this study, the computational domain consisted of approximately 5 million cells and 140,000 total surfaces.

Fig. 4. The divided part of computational cell with the mesh of surface.

The number of computational cells depends on the detailed surface information. If the tetra surface is small, the number of computational cells will be greater. Engineers decide the number of total cells by reviewing the size of each cell and the tetra mesh of the surfaces. Attention to how accurately the geometry detail reects reality is always considered. 2.4. The modeling of heat exchanger and fan 2.4.1. Heat exchanger model The condenser and radiator cores were modeled as rectangular uid domains with empirical correlations for the airside pressure drop. Two porous zones were dened: one for the condenser and the other for the radiator. The resistance coecients were determined from the pressure drop curve provided by the component calorimeter test. In the momentum equation, this pressure drop was treated as a source term. The heat transfer between the ambient air and the coolant was modeled using e NTU. The eectiveness of the heat exchanger is dened as the ratio of the actual heat transfer rate to the maximum possible heat transfer rate. With applicable correlations of e NTU, which can be found for any standard heat exchanger, the eectiveness ee of the radiator was obtained. The total heat transfer rate can be calculated as shown below _ _ qrad mca eeff T w;i T a;i 8

Fig. 3. Geometry of vehicle model connected with computational domain.

Eq. (8) shows that the higher the core eectiveness the higher the radiator capacity is for a given temperature dierence between two uids. The table of ee from an experimental data is the function of air velocity and coolant ow rate. The changes of ee, ca and Ta,i are small under normal operating conditions. Therefore, the supply coolant inlet temperature Tw,i is the parameter that dominates the capacity for a given airow rate. The engine heat into coolant was measured by a test or was estimated by a vehi-

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cle laboratory. In the program, the heat capacity of the radiator was treated as a heat source in the energy equation. The engine heat into coolant was a given value. If there is a deviation, the program automatically iterates and adjusts the coolant inlet temperature. The employed heat exchanger model computes both the total heat rejection of the core and the coolant inlet temperature of the radiator in accordance with operating ambient conditions. In the engines part-load operating range, a conventional cooling system has to remove an excessive amount of heat and considerably lower the component temperature. Fig. 5 shows the heat balance in part-load road going operation. Q_Engine_In is the energy supplied to the engine, Pe is the eective engine power and Q_exhaust is the waste heat to surrounding atmosphere. Q_water, the engine heat into coolant, is about 20% of the energy supplied to the engine [8] and should be used as the heat rejection, which should be cooled by the radiator in the analysis of the cooling system. 2.4.2. Fan model The fan pressure rise over the blades was obtained from experimental data and was treated as a source term in the momentum equation. The pressure rise curve from experimentally obtained data was modeled with dimensionless fan function like /, w _ Q / 9 Afan U tip DP static w1 10 qU 2 tip 2 Since the fan characteristics depend on the air density in the fan blade region, the dimensionless function was correlated to the air temperature at the estimated working condition in the vehicle. 2.5. Others To accurately calculate cooling airow rates, the energy equation has to be solved simultaneously with the momen-

tum equations using variable uid properties for density and viscosity. These uid properties vary with temperature. Density was modeled using an incompressible ideal gas law and viscosity was modeled using a polynomial function. The turbulence model used was standard ke with standard wall functions. The calculation was carried out in continuous steps: the momentum and the turbulence equations were solved and the energy equations were solved simultaneously with the heat exchanger model activated. A system of linear equations was solved by using the SIP Solver [9,10]. A Strongly-Implicit-Procedure (SIP Solver) according to Stone is suitable for solving systems of linear equations resulting from a discretisation of partial dierential equations. 3. Results and discussion 3.1. Test experiment The radiator instrumentation packages consisted of 15 vane anemometers mounted to the front face of the core, refer to Fig. 6a. The system was calibrated on a ow stand over a wide range of ow rates with fanmotorshroud assembly installed. The accuracy of the corrected ow rate measurements on the ow stand was about 2%.

Fig. 5. Thermal balance of an engine during part-load.

Fig. 6. (a) Fifteen anemometers which were installed on the frontal surface of radiator. (b) The distribution of air velocity obtained by experimental test.

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The laboratory calibration on the ow stand was necessary to improve the quality of experimental data by removing some of the uncertainties in the measurement system. These uncertainties were; (a) the circular anemometers did not completely cover the rectangle radiators, (b) the ram air induced airow caused the anemometers to measure an inaccurate airow, and (c) the shroud and fan imposed non-uniform velocity gradients across the radiator [11]. In the real vehicle test, the front end congurations imposed additional velocity gradients across the radiator as shown in Fig. 6b. Fig. 7 shows the deviation between measurement and simulation. Of particular note is that the deviation is greater at high speed. The reason is that the ram air induced airow caused the anemometers to measure an inaccurate airow as mentioned previously. The measured air velocity of test was an average of 15 anemometer readings. Similarly, the air velocity in the simulation was a calculated average corresponding to the air velocity readings at locations matching the test setup, refer to Fig. 6.

To measure the coolant ow rate, turbine type ow meters were installed in the inlet part of the radiator to measure the exact coolant ow rate in the real vehicle system. Thermocouples were used to measure the coolant inlet and outlet temperatures. An estimate of the exact heat rejection of the radiator was then calculated. It was assumed that this calculated heat rejection was the same with the engine heat into the coolant, which was used as an input for the program. A calculated coolant inlet temperature will be compared with simulation result to validate the developed program through this study.

Fig. 7. Comparison between test and simulation in the averaged air velocity based on the position of 15 anemometers before radiator.

Table 1 Test and simulation condition (variation based on the condition of 50 km/h) Vehicle speed 50 km/h (8% G/L) 100 km/h (6% G/L) 140 km/h Coolant ow rate Base 49.0% " 42.5% " Engine heat into coolant Base 27.7% " 16.6% " Condenser heat rejection Base 33.3% " 50.0% " Fig. 8. The layout of fan used in test, simulation and the radiator of (a) (c) type is radiator A: (a) center position fan, (b) partial displacement fan, (c) partial displacement fan containing 3 holes (the area of each hole: 0.00304 m2) on the shroud.

All test data come from the experimental measurement.

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3.2. Test and simulation conditions The vehicle model used through this study was C class in the classication of vehicle grade. Test and simulation were done with various conditions of each vehicle speed

as described in Table 1. Additionally, both test and simulation were done in accordance with changing the layout of the fan, radiator and fan power. The results were compared with each other in the view point of relative comparison. 3.3. The discussion

Table 2 The specication of radiator A and radiator B Type of radiator Radiator A Radiator B Width (mm) 636.0 636.0 Height (mm) 460.0 460.0 Fin density (FPDM) 70 90

The depth of all radiators is 18.5 mm.

3.3.1. The eect of fan layout Fig. 8ac shows the layout of the fan used in the test and simulation. The radiator used in this study is radiator A, refer to Table 2. The performance of the fan is generally not aected by the shroud type on the airow stand. However, in a case where heat exchangers interfere with a fan,

Fig. 9. Simulation result showing the distribution of air velocity before radiator and the coolant temperature in the tube of radiator A in accordance with the layout of fan at 50 km/h; (a) center position fan, (b) partial displacement fan, (c) partial displacement fan containing 3 holes on the shroud.

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this interference does aect the airow pattern and airow rate through heat exchangers and fan. Normally, the non-uniform airow due to the shroud type makes the performance of the heat exchanger worse. Therefore, it is necessary to make the ow uniform before the heat exchanger as much as possible. Fig. 9 shows the result in accordance with the fan type. If the fan type is a partial displacement fan (Fig. 9b), this increases the resistance of fan shroud and makes the airow pattern more non-uniform. This then reduces the airow rate through heat exchanger. To reduce the eect of a partial displacement fan, installation of holes on the surface of the fan shroud were created to reduce the resistance. This increases the airow rate proportional to vehicle speed. These holes on the shroud play a primary role at high vehicle speed (above 100 km/h). The reason is that the ram air has little eect on airow rate at low speed. In this case, the fan performance dominates the airow rate through the heat exchanger. However at high speed, the airow rate is dominated by the ram air and the holes in the shroud have the eect of reducing the resistance of the shroud. Fig. 9c is nearly the same airow pattern with Fig. 9b as mentioned above. However, observe the airow through these holes when the vehicle speed is over 100 km/h. Sometimes the use of a partial displacement fan is needed because of engine packaging and to avoid interfering with other components. In this case, these holes on the shroud help to increase the airow. Fig. 10a shows the dierence of coolant inlet temperature at each vehicle speed according to the fan type. The maximum deviation between test and simulation is 1.1 C. The eect of holes on the shroud is large at 100 and 140 km/h, refer to Fig. 10b. 3.3.2. The eect of radiator performance Fig. 11a shows that the performance of radiator B is much better than that of radiator A, specications of these radiators are in Table 2. The airside pressure drop of radiator B is also higher than that of radiator A. Ref. [3] shows that if the engine heat into the coolant is increased by about 2%, the coolant inlet temperature of the radiator is decreased by 1.4 C. Both the heat rejection into the coolant and the performance of the radiator had a greater eect on the coolant inlet temperature than other factors such as airow. In this study, we observe that the coolant temperature decreased from 4.2 to 5.8 C in the case of changing radiator A into radiator B. The airow rate also was reduced, but test data showed a lesser eect than simulation did (Fig. 10a). The test data contains uncertainty of measurement and invisible error because theoretically the result of simulation is right. 3.3.3. The eect of fan power When increasing the motor power of the fan from A power to B power with the same base fan, Fig. 11b shows the gap of fan PQ curves decreased as airow rate

Fig. 10. (a) The dierence between partial displacement fan and center position fan in relative comparison (the result of partial displacement fan that of center position fan). (b) The dierence between partial displacement fan having 3 holes on the shroud and partial displacement fan in relative comparison (the result of partial displacement fan having 3 holes that of partial displacement fan).

increased. With this phenomenon, it can be estimated that the airow rate will be close to each other at the high speed of vehicle. The test and simulation showed the results to be as expected. That is, the coolant inlet temperature has a larger dierence for a vehicle at low speed as compared with a vehicle at high speed. Fig. 12b shows that the higher the vehicle speed the lower the eect of the fan is. Through this study, good information was obtained. If the coolant inlet temperature has a high value, there is little gained by increasing the fan power. One needs to increase the performance of the radiator to avoid the overheating.

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Fig. 11. (a) The thermal performance of radiator A and B. (b) Fan PQ data according to the fan motor power.

Fig. 12. (a) The relative comparison when changing radiator A into radiator B (the result of using radiator B that of using radiator A). (b) The relative comparison when changing A fan power into B fan power (the result of using B power fan that of using A power fan) in this case of using radiator A.

3.3.4. The eect of heat rejection into coolant As a parametric study, a simulation of the coolant inlet temperature while changing the heat rejection into the coolant was completed. The study assumes a 5%, 10% and 20% increase to the heat rejection into the coolant. Table 3a shows the coolant inlet temperature and the linearity in accordance with increased heat rejection. It is very important to measure or get the exact heat rejection from test or the automobile maker. 3.3.5. The eect of ambient air temperature With changing the ambient temperature, the prediction of coolant inlet temperature is also linear with the ambient temperature as seen in Table 3b. The variation of coolant

Table 3 (a) The variation of coolant inlet temperature according to the engine heat into coolant at 50 km/h. (b) The variation of coolant inlet temperature according to the ambient temperature at 50 km/h (a) (b) Engine heat into coolant dT of coolant inlet temperature Ambient temperature dT of coolant inlet temperature 5.00% " 2.88 C " 10.0 C " 11.9 C " 10.0% " 5.76 C " 20.0 C " 23.8 C " 20.0% " 11.6 C "

temperature is proportional to the ambient temperature because the ITD (Inlet Temperature Dierence = coolant inlet temperature inlet air temperature) should aect the heat performance of the radiator. The coolant inlet

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show results obtained from this program as output examples including contour velocity plots and air particle traces. (1) The predicted air velocity before the radiator was well matched with test data within a maximum deviation of 7.9%. (2) The partial displacement fan has little gain in the coolant inlet temperature and the maximum deviation between test and simulation is 1.1 C. (3) The holes in the shroud had the eect of reducing the resistance of the shroud at high vehicle speeds by increasing the air ow rate. (4) The radiator performance with ambient temperature and engine heat into coolant had a linear relation with the coolant inlet temperature. (5) There is no performance improvement by increasing the fan power at high speeds to reduce the coolant inlet temperature.

References
[1] Magna Powertrain, KULI Tutorial Manual, version 7.0, pp. 163181. [2] Bernhard Uhl, Fredrich Brotz, Jurgen Fauser, Uwe Kruger, Development of Engine Cooling Systems by Coupling CFD Simulations and Heat Exchanger Analysis Programs, SAE Paper 2001-01-1695. [3] Andres Jerhamre, Andres Jonson, Development and Validation of Coolant Temperature and Cooling Air Flow CFD Simulations at Volvo Cars, SAE Paper 2004-01-0051. [4] Tetsuya Sakai, Shinichi Ishiguro, Yoshifusa Sudoh, The Optimum Design of Engine Cooling System by Computer Simulation, SAE Paper 942270. [5] John Moat, Coupling of 1D and 3D CFD Models to Predict Transient Hydraulics in an Engine Cooling Circuit, SAE Paper 200201-1285. [6] Wilko Jason, Ales Alajbegovic, Bing Xu, Alex Konstantinov, Joe Amodeo, Simulation of Cooling Airow under Dierent Driving Conditions, SAE Paper 2007-01-0766. [7] Nicolas Francois, Using CFD for heat exchanger development and thermal management, in: 2nd European Automotive CFD Conference, pp. 185196. [8] Wolf-Heinrich Hucho, Aerodynamics of Road Vehicles, fourth ed., p. 536. [9] H.L. Stone, Iterative solution of implicit approximations of multidimensional partial dierential equations, SIAM Journal of Numerical Analysis 5 (1968) 530558. [10] C.-J. Kim, Computational Fluid Dynamics, second ed., pp. 395400. [11] Jack Williams, Guru Vemaganti, CFD Quality A Calibration Study for Front-End Cooling Airow, SAE Paper 980039, 1998, 133147.

Fig. 13. (a) The contour of air velocity in the vehicle model. (b) The air particle trace through a vehicle model as a result.

temperature has to be increased in proportion to the increased inlet air temperature before the radiator due to the ambient temperature increased to meet the engine heat into coolant. 4. Conclusion Through this study, a 3D CFD program to predict the performance of the engine cooling module under various operating conditions was accomplished. Validation of this program with experimental data was completed. Fig. 13

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