Charge Air Cooler (CAC)
Turbochargers are used to compress the engine intake air to increase its density. But compressing the air increases its temperature as well as the pressure. This increase in temperature causes a portion of air to decrease in density. For this reason a Charge Air Cooler (CAC) is used to reject the heat to the atmosphere thereby recovering the density.
Charge Air cooling systems comes in two types – Water cooled and Air cooled. In an air-to-air heat exchanger the heat is rejected directly to the atmosphere and in the latter the heat is rejected to the coolant in the air-to-water heat exchanger.
Water cooled charge air cooler tends to have low thermal resistance and hence occupies less space than an air-to-air system. But mostly air-to-air cooling systems are used and this comes with three different variants – Box type, Bed type and Full-face type CACs.
CFD Simulation
The key performance parameter for all CACs is the pressure drop on the charge air side. Since the compressed has a temperature increase of about 200˚C, CACs are designed to cool this air to about 40 ˚C – 45 ˚C to further improve its density allowing more air volume to enter into the engine. This ultimately increases the performance and efficiency of the engine.
CACs are much like radiators with corrugated fins and flat sided tubes. The tubes contain secondary surfaces in the form of offset strips or plain fins depending on the pressure drop requirement of that particular application.
Leveraging CFD simulations can help the Product development team to determine the pressure drop for different tube profiles, air velocity and temperature. With the quantifiable data, engineers now can understand the pressure drop due to different louver configurations and hence make calculated design decisions early during the development process.
Conclusion:
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