Eco-Efficient Vehicle Cooling Modules with Integrated Diffusers—Thermal, Energy, and Environmental Analyses

Abstract

The automotive domain is a very good candidate for energy management, particularly due to the huge amounts of energy lost by heat through exhaust and water-cooling systems. This makes the optimization of vehicle cooling modules directly related to energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission. In this context, contemporary designs that employ diffusers between the forward-facing of an automobile and its heat exchanger subjected to airflow are presented in this work. The ultimate aim is to reduce the fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of vehicles. Based on the aforementioned design, the intensity of the air velocity would be decreased but distributed over a larger exchanger surface. Consequently, the velocity non-uniformity of the airflow upstream would decrease and therefore, the thermal performance would increase. The above-mentioned conclusion is a result of parametric numerical analysis and its associated numerical results that disclosed the enhancement of water-air heat exchanger thermal performance. To perform a parametric numerical analysis of the heat exchanger thermal performance for the new suggested configurations, a computational code was developed and validated to estimate the thermal performance for a known set of parameters. It was shown that for an automobile, with engine power ranging from 100–200 kW that is utilized for three hours a day and equipped with a diffuser, reduction of up to 2.91 kg (3.89 L) of gasoline consumption and 9.51 kg of CO2 emission can be achieved per day. The originality of the present work resides in the use of diffusers in cooling modules of vehicles, the thermal modeling of heat exchanger’s thermal performance along with its associated code, and the parametric analysis performed to prove the potential enhancement related to the use of diffusers in the cooling modules.