An Aerodynamical Study and Optimization of the Flow in a Truck Fan Shroud

Abstract

The cooling fan installation has become a critical feature since the power requirement for a typical heavy-duty truck engine fan is in no way negligible. Also it contributes in large amounts to the total noise emitted by the truck. In order to develop their products further, Volvo 3p issued a Master Thesis Project to study the general behavior and performance of one of their current fan shrouds in a truck installation. The main purpose was a general study in order to further optimize the cooling performance of the truck. The tool to use was CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics), in the means of commercial available code. For this thesis ANSA together with the Star-CD package was used. In the optimization part, the primary objective was to optimize the mass flux through the radiator core, secondary considerations was uniformity of the flow. Generally the cooling performance increase the most if areas of low velocities are activated. With the limitations imposed by CFD kept in mind, such as turbulence models, discretization and under relaxation, this work suggest an availability of 27% of improvement of the mass flux, corresponding cooling performance improvement is 13%. This is for the default case of a fan speed of 1600rpm and a pressure drop of 700Pa, over the entire installation