COOLING AIR CIRCUIT DEVELOPMENT SERVICES

 

Clement Mesa has had a long working relationship with Professor Dr. John Foss, Director of the Turbulent Shear Flows Lab (TSFL) of Michigan State University (MSU). The work has primarily focused on developing better understanding of the behavior of the water and air sides of cooling systems, so as to optimize heat transfer and performance of engine cooling systems, and reduce drag.

 

The lessons learned, technologies and development processes are now offered as services to OEM and builders of specialty vehicles, and stationary powerplants for improved cooling system performance.  This is not research, but the application of learned procedures.

 

Development items readily available are:

 

☼ The fan, shroud and radiator module behave as a “prime mover”, sensitive to the fan disk distance relative to the rear face of the heat exchanger.  The performance of the heat exchanger can therefore be improved by optimizing the geometry of this prime mover system, with the “sweet spot” determined and optimized experimentally.  Opportunities for the reduction of 1st order (viscous) and 2nd order (turbulent) contributions to the pressure drop of the cooling airflow are identified as part of the process.

☼ Characterization of a fan and system flow fields using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) techniques, whereby a dual pulse laser light sheet provides the information of how a small cluster of particles moves in a time period, so small that a local velocity magnitude can be inferred. The resulting data provides velocity components in the plane of the laser sheet.

☼ Complete fan characterization services are available, such as the fan curve; shaft loads, power consumption, precession, tip recirculation, optimal FOOS, etc.

 

The high-detail experimental data outputs and PIV fields ideally support the verification, development and evolution of complex CFD models for the grille, front end, heat exchanger/fan system, especially in conjunction with experimental underhood flow visualization work. 

 

ADVANCED COOLING AIR CIRCUIT SEMINAR

 

Dr. Foss and Mr. Mesa offer a 1-day seminar, presenting processes developed to optimize the cooling air circuit concurrent with the theme, hard point, DMA and vehicle architecture development phases. It produces hard data in time to influence the front end and heat exchanger module and fan system design prior to freeze timing. It also discovers airside deficiencies before the tooling is cut and prototypes for testing and the verification are built or already accruing test miles.

 

SCHEDULE: The seminar is scheduled on request.

 

PLEASE CONTACT:

Professor Dr. John F. Foss

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research Complex - Engineering

Michigan State University

East Lansing, MI  48824

Ph: (517) 355-3337

e-mail: <foss@msu.edu>

 

Schematic of the MSU - TSFL Fan Test Tunnel Facility

Installed fan performance curves