Numerical auxiliary study of charge-air cooler design

HUANG Rui1， LI Hong-miao1， HAN Song1， CHEN Jun-xuan1， HUANG Yu-qi1， LU Guo-dong2
（1. Power Machinery and Vehicular Engineering Institute， Zhejiang University， Hangzhou 310027， China；
2. Zhejiang Yinlun Machinery Co.，Ltd.， Tiantai 317200， China）

Abstract： Heat exchange efficiency and flow resistance are definitively influenced by the fins' structure and dimension of both hot and cold sides，as to the plate-fin charge-air cooler. Accordingly，how to select and match fins is proved to be the most important process in charge-air cooler design. Aiming at investigating the performance of charge-air cooler with different fin combinations，numerical auxiliary studies and experiment were carried out.Combined with computer aided design（CAD）and computational fluid dynamics（CFD）analysis，numerical auxiliary studies were carried out to investigate the cooler design，simulation，comparison and selection. Findings were consistent with wind tunnel experiment which was used to validate the effectiveness of the method. The results indicate that the match of toothed fin on hot side and orthogonal-wave fin on cold side is most effective among all the 8 alternative combinations of different fin structures. Heat exchange performance can be improved by properly reducing the channel height of the hot side，increasing the fins' number and decreasing the fin pitch.
Key words： charge-air cooler； fin construction； numerical simulation