Hierarchical Thermal Management Prototyping Design Tool for Ground Vehicles

The project objective is to develop an integrated, hierarchical flow and thermal design tool for rapid virtual prototyping of military and commercial ground vehicles. Reduced scale flow+thermal modeling of components will be done with innovative use ofartificial neural nets (ANNs), which will be coupled with an advanced multi-disciplinary, parallelized CFD-thermal solver. The coupled tools will be able to perform fast, system level, calculations using only ANNs, detailed CFD and thermal solutions ofspecific systems, or a combination of CFD in part of the domain linked with other systems represented by ANNs. A viscous Cartesian grid generator with links to CAD packages will be used for rapid grid generation in complex geometries. A comprehensive GUIfor drag-and-drop capability for reduced-scale model assembly and CFD model setups will be developed. Phase I work will focus on building the multilevel (CFD + ANNs) simulation capability, which will be demonstrated on selected subsystems in a militaryvehicle. Phase II work will include linking the tool with the selected product data management system (PDMS). Development of the GUI will be completed. Automated, script-driven procedures will be developed for ANN model generation with a comprehensivelibrary of reduced-scale models. The developed design tool will be demonstrated and validated on thermal optimization on a selected vehicle. The developed numerical design tools will provide fast, accurate predictions of the flow+thermal characteristics offuture army transport vehicles, and allow virtual prototyping and optimization of vehicle and subsystems for optimum performance, efficiency and survivability. The numerical environment has substantial commercial potential in automotive industry wherethese tools will be directly applicable. The generic flow+thermal tools will also be useful in thermal prototyping of other applications such as aircraft engine externals, HVAC systems in buildings, appliances, and manufacturing processes and equipment.