Simulation of heating systems in vehicles

Abstract

Vehtec AB is a company working on building and developing heating systems for buses. One of the main components of the heating system is the heating unit, which called Eldi heater. The purpose of the thesis is to simulate Eldi heater using commercial CFD software, and to validate the simulation results by running a lap experiment. This simulation will provide an inner view of the flow motion and what could be done to improve the efficiency of the heater. After running the first simulation for the original model, it seemed likely that the efficiency could be improved by altering the geometry. Three models with different geometry were built and simulated to try to improve the flow turbulence and the duration the water spend inside the heating unit, hence increasing the heat transfer rate from the heating elements to the water volume. Two models have showed improvement compared to the original one. Model two had the best results with temperature increase by 7% and 14 % reduction in time.