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Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 1438e1446

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Applied Thermal Engineering

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apthermeng

Thermal/structural analysis of radiators for heavy-duty trucks

Shaolin Mao a, *, Changrui Cheng b, Xianchang Li c, Efstathios E. Michaelides d
a
Center for Computation & Technology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
b
Tech Center, Caterpillar Inc., Mossville, IL 61552, USA
c
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Lamar University, Beaumont, TX 77710, USA
d
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A thermal/structural coupling approach is applied to analyze thermal performance and predict the
Received 13 December 2009 thermal stress of a radiator for heavy-duty transportation cooling systems. Bench test and field test data
Accepted 4 March 2010 show that non-uniform temperature gradient and dynamic pressure loads may induce large thermal
Available online 16 March 2010
stress on the radiator. A finite element analysis (FEA) tool is used to predict the strains and displacement
of radiator based on the solid wall temperature, wall-based fluid film heat transfer coefficient and
Keywords:
pressure drop. These are obtained from a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. A 3D simu-
Dual porous zone (DPZ)
lation of turbulent flow and coupled heat transfer between the working fluids poses a major difficulty
Cooling system
Radiator
because the range of length scales involved in heavy-duty radiators varies from few millimeters of the fin
Thermal stresses pitch and/or tube cross-section to several meters for the overall size of the radiator. It is very compu-
tational expensive, if not impossible, to directly simulate the turbulent heat transfer between fins and the
thermal boundary layer in each tube. In order to overcome the computational difficulties, a dual porous
zone (DPZ) method is applied, in which fins in the air side and turbulators in the water side are treated as
porous region. The parameters involved in the DPZ method are tuned based on experimental data
in prior. A distinguished advantage of the porous medium method is its effectiveness of modeling
wide-range characteristic scale problems. A parametric study of the impact of flow rate on the heat
transfer coefficient is presented. The FEA results predict the maximum value of stress/strain and target
locations for possible structural failure and the results obtained are consistent with experimental
observations. The results demonstrate that the coupling thermal/structural analysis is a powerful tool
applied to heavy-duty cooling product design to improve the radiator thermal performance, durability
and reliability under rigid working environment.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction component deterioration in components such as the head gasket

The interest in the thermal/structural studies of radiators
arises mainly because of crack-induced leakage and other failures
in heavy-duty cooling system and the difficult to pin point the
root of the cause. The radiator is a key component in a cooling
package to remove heat from the diesel engines of heavy-duty
trucks. With the Tier-IV emission regulations and new engine
heat rejection data, radiator and other cooling components are
required to be re-designed and validated. The huge unsteady
heat rejection and water pressure loads induce strong thermal
stresses that become a critical issue for the design and manu-
facture of heavy-duty cooling systems. The large, non-uniform
thermal stresses in a radiator result in material degradation and
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: slm_wvu@yahoo.com (S. Mao).
or the water pump sealing. It is not rare to replace the whole
radiator module in order to prevent loss of coolant and over-
heating of the engine, which may result in significant engine
damage.
There are several reasons that cause structure stresses in radi-
ators. One major cause is the non-uniform temperature gradient as
the hot water carrying an unsteady heat load from diesel engine
flows into the top header, tubes and the bottom header of the
radiator. Internal pressure buildup is considered as another primary
cause: during the engine run, the water pressure increases causing
high strain levels in the radiator tubes and header. In this case, the
maximum stress appears at the joint between the tubes and
radiator header. For these reasons, thermal/structure analysis has
drawn wide attention during the stages of concept design and
prototyping to better predict the stresses during the radiator design
and to improve the structural reliability and long-term durability of
the radiator.

1359-4311/$ e see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2010.03.003
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S. Mao et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 1438e1446 1439

Compared with radiators in an automotive system and other

HVAC systems, several unique factors are involved in heavy-duty
radiator thermal/structural analysis. First, the variable heat loads of
a machine operating on a dynamic cycle are difficult to predict
accurately. Second, large industrial radiators are made up of several
smaller core sections (modular radiators) that are bolted together
with the aid of small tanks between the cores. An important design
requirement is the feasibility to permit the cores to be repaired on
site with a minimum number of tools. In this case and from the
designer’s point of view, a big challenge is to be able to effectively
weld the tube to the header using a special welding method and
process. This guarantees that the joint would not fail under the
strong thermal stresses that are induced at it.
In this study, the scope of the work is limited, the thermal/ Fig. 2. Part of the top header of a radiator modular and the tetrahedral volume cells are
structural analysis focuses on a single modular radiator and it does created using TGRID tool.

not discuss or analyze the displacement and strain levels between

modules. Fig. 1 shows a schematic diagram of a heavy-duty radiator
which consists approximately of twenty module cores, in which or at-risk systems in the radiator under normal and severe dynamic
water splits and mixes through the top, the middle and the bottom operating conditions. The prediction of the thermal stress and the
tanks. A typical modular arrangement is a single pass, cross-flow, improvement of the warranty process of radiators are critical in the
tube-wavy fin, and bar-plate structure with a turbulator inside each product improvement cycle.
tube to enhance the heat transfer coefficient. Fig. 2 shows the
surface meshing used in CFD simulation for the top header of
2. Governing equations and methodology
a modular radiator.
The objective of the study is to combine CFD for the fluids part
Two independent models are combined to investigate the
and FEA tools for the solids part to analyze, verify and validate the
complicated thermal stress field that is developed in the radiator.
radiator thermal design and to provide a method that improves the
The first model, flow-coupled thermal analysis, is based on the
structural durability for the industrial applications of cooling
finite volume method [18] and has the advantages of robustness
packages. Parametric studies are also presented to optimize the
and accuracy. The second model, structural displacement and strain
thermal performance of the main heavy-duty heat exchanger.
modeling, stems from the finite element method but is simpler to
In last two decades CFD has proven to be a powerful analysis tool
apply [2]. The solid surface temperature, wall-based fluid film heat
and has been used for radiator design, verification and validation
transfer coefficients and fluid pressure results, which are obtained
[8,22,25]. The method has clear advantages over semi-analytical
from the CFD method, are used as direct input (that is, as initial and
and semi-empirical methods that have evolved in the past for the
boundary conditions) in a structural/thermal analysis to simulate
concept design and performance rating applications that appear in
the stresses and strains developed as well as the displacement. This
many heat exchanger books [10,12,21]. Given the radiator type, size,
approach is accurate and does not make any use of assumptions
heat load, and the allowable coolant temperature, the CFD analysis
pertaining to the temperature field distribution. The approach also
effectively predicts the air volume flow rate, the engine jacket
demonstrates the effectiveness of transferring and mapping data
water flow rate and other important parameters of the heat
from CFD to FEA by using similar data structures [6]. This is a novel
rejection system. The results obtained from CFD simulations such
approach for the analysis of thermal packages in heavy-duty tracks
as solid surface temperature, wall-based fluid film heat transfer
that has been absent in the open literature in the subject of heat
coefficient and water pressure drop are used as the input (initial
exchangers design and analysis.
and boundary conditions) for the analysis (using finite elements) of
The Reynolds Averaged NaviereStokes (RANS) model with their
thermal stresses to determine the possible location of debris, crack
pertinent closure equations are employed to simulate the air flow,
the water flow (Ree104 in tube and Re > 105 in air side flow) and the
coupled heat transfer between air and water in the radiator. The
governing equations of the mass, momentum and energy for each
fluid are given as follows [11]:

vr v
þ ðrui Þ ¼ 0 (1)
vt vxi
!!
v v  vp v vui vuj 2 vui
ðrui Þ þ rui uj ¼  þ m þ  d
vt vxj vxi vxj vxj vxi 3 ij vxi
v 
þ  ru0i u0j ð2Þ
vxj

!!
v  v  v vT v 
rcp T þ rcp uj T ¼ k þ  rT 0 u0j þ mF
vt vxj vxj vxj vxj
(3)

Fig. 1. Schematic of heavy-duty radiator (20 module cores are included; top, middle In order to close the system of equations, the RNG kee model has
and bottom tanks are used for coolant to mix and split). been used to model the Reynolds stresses, which is the final term at
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the right hand side of Eq. (2). A similar method has been applied for Table 1
the Reynolds heat flux, the second term at the right hand side of Boundary conditions for cross-flow water-to-air radiator module (operating
conditions).
Eq. (3). The last term mF in Eq. (3) is the viscous dissipation term
[3,13], which is computationally very expensive to calculate. The Air side Water side
main reason for this is the range of length scales involved in the (cold fluid) (hot fluid)

analysis of a heavy-duty radiator module, which vary from few
millimeters of the fin pitch and the tube cross sections to the
several meters of the overall size of the modular core. There are
more than 130 tubes in a single module and if each tube cross-
section is resolved by 20e24 grid nodes, the total volume meshes
could easily reach 10 million cells by using a tetrahedral mesh. Even
in this case of using 10 million cells, a computational method still
cannot effectively resolve the thermal boundary layer in each
tube and this poses a big challenge for any 3D numerical
computations.
In order to overcome the computational difficulties encountered
with the wide-range of length scales, the so-called dual porous zone
(DPZ) method is applied to simulate the complex geometry of such
a modular radiator. A local thermal equilibrium (LTE) is assumed for
the application of DPZ method and the following thermal results
are only for steady state conditions. According to the porous
medium method [5,9], the fins and side sheets are treated as porous
solid region and the cold fluid (air) in the pores is often be modeled
as a continuous phase. A similar method is used to model the hot
fluid (water) flow in the tubes, where the porous medium effect is
included in each tube in order to account for the effects of the wall
roughness and the turbulators. The method avoids solving the
thermal boundary layer directly [7] but includes the effects of this
layer in the overall computations. A noteworthy advantage of the
DPZ method is its effectiveness to model a wide-range of charac-
teristic scale problems.
Instead of following complex time-averaged and volume-aver-
aged turbulent flow governing equations in porous media [4,17,19],
the porous media incorporates empirically determined flow resis-
tance in the computational domain. It is important to know the
limitation and assumptions for the following simple model: First,
only approximate turbulent effects is considered and we are
interested in macro-effects of fins/tubes on fluid and heat transfer;
Second, the porous media model is nothing but a momentum sink
and energy sink to the system; Third, steady state condition is
assumed for thermal analysis. Porous media are modeled by adding
source terms to the right hand side of the RANS model and, hence
the source terms for the momentum Eq. (2) are [7]:
0 1
X
3 X
3 E
si ¼ @ Dij mvj þ Cij rjvjvj A
j¼1 j¼1
The subscript denotes three spatial directions. The first term on
the right hand side of Eq. (4) is a linear term representing the
viscous loss when fluid passes porous media. The second term is
a non-linear term, the inertial loss of the flow. The determination of
the viscous and the inertial loss coefficients is based on experi-
mental data and empirical equations of the volumetric flow rate
and pressure drop and the coefficients are prescribed in the
simulation. For example, 0.01e0.05 of Ci,i ¼ 1,2,3, 0.2e0.75 of Di,
i ¼ 1,2,3 for homogenous porous media based on cold air and hot
water flow rates.
The equivalent thermal conductivity keff is used to replace the
parameter k for a single-phase fluid and, therefore, to include the
thermal inertia of the solid region on the fluid flow in the energy
Inlet mass flow rate (kg/s) 5.0 4.8
Inlet flow temperature ( C) 40 92
Outlet flow temperature ( C) 73 82
Inlet pressure (kPa) 101 287
Outlet pressure (kPa) 235
where g is the porosity of the porous medium. Similar process is
used for the equivalent specific heat ceff and density reff in energy
Eq. (3) The porosity is defined as the corresponding volumetric
fraction of fluid on the air side and the water side of the radiator,
respectively. It is not difficult to compute the porosity as the
geometry of radiator is given. kf and ks are the thermal conductiv-
ities for the fluid phase and solid medium, respectively. These
values are also given, a priori in the simulation. Thin-wall heat
conduction is used for the thermal resistance calculation in the
tube. The near-wall formulation, the wall function-based model, is
used to calculate the wall shear stresses and heat transfer. The wall
function-based heat transfer coefficients are given by the following
expression [24]:
q_ rcp Cm1=4 k1=2
P
h ¼ ¼ (6)
Tw  TP T*
where Tw is the wall temperature, TP is the selected fluid temper-
ature at point P close to the wall, T* is a non-dimensional parameter,
characteristic temperature, and was calculated through the
Reynolds’ analogy between the momentum and the energy trans-
port by standard wall functions. The turbulent kinetic energy, kP at
point P, is obtained from the turbulent model used. The density r,
the specific heat cp and the constant Cm are properties of the fluid
and the turbulence model and are also known.
The significant temperature gradient and the dynamic pressure
load during the running of the engine result in large, localized
thermal expansions, which are the cause of most thermal stresses.
The general form of maximum thermal stress on a surface is given
by [1,14]:
st ¼ aDT (7)
(4) 1m
where st is the tensile stress of the cooling system material, E is the
Young’s elastic modulus, a is the coefficient of thermal expansion,
m is Poisson’s ratio and DT is the temperature difference. The
Young’s modulus E and the Poisson’s ratio m are assumed to be
constant. The thermal expansion coefficient a is also considered as
a constant and was incorporated into the elastic equations. Thus,
the classic elastic model can be used for the thermal stress analysis
[15,23]. Since the cooling system materials are metals and isotropic,
Table 2
Geometric and material parameters for the water-to-air radiator module.
Wavy fin Tube

Eq. (3). The equivalent thermal conductivity of the porous medium Material Aluminum Copper
is given by the following appropriate average [20]: Thickness (mm) 0.05 0.17
Pitch 9.2 fin per inch (fpi) 11 mm (lateral direction)
Cross-section (mm2) 1.4  19
keff ¼ gkf þ ð1  gÞks (5) Length (mm) 1100
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the relations of stress, total strain, and temperatures are given as

follows:

1
 
3x ¼ E sx  m sy þ sz þ aT
1
3y ¼ sy  mðsz þ sx Þ þ aT
E
1  
3z ¼ sz  m sx þ sy þ aT
E
2ð1 þ mÞ
gyz ¼ syz
E
2ð1 þ mÞ
gzx ¼ szx
E
2ð1 þ mÞ
gxy ¼ sxy (8)
E

3. Computational method

The computations for the solution of the governing and closure

equations were conducted using general purposed commercial
Fig. 3. Static pressure drop contours (Pa) distribution for forced convection flow
software, FLUENT for CFD simulation and ABAQUS for the FEA. The condition (hot water flows from the top header to the bottom header, y direction).
computational domain for air flow and heat transfer is a virtual box
which comprises all tubes and fins but it does not include the top
and bottom headers. Air flows in the x direction from left to right diesel engine is turned on) and the second case involves colder
side, passes through tubes and fins and no entrainment effects are water flow through tubes (diesel engine turn off). Forced convec-
considered from y and z directions. Pressure boundary condition is tive heat transfer occurs in both cases. The reason for these choices
used for the virtual box. Water flow is bounded by the top header, is to obtain the CFD and heat transfer results and, based on these, to
the bottom header and tubes which constitutes the computational conduct transient FEA computations for the thermal stresses.
domain of water flow and heat transfer. The outer walls of top and The following discussion of CFD results focuses on the hot water
bottom headers are assuming as adiabatic conditions and heat case. A bench test case was first used to tune up the viscous
rejection from the coolant (water) is equal to heat removal by the resistance coefficients Dij and inertial resistance coefficients Cij in
cooling air (energy balance). The heat transfer coupling between Eq. (4), which are required in the DPZ models. Given both the
water, solid tubes and air is simulated using multi-layers thermal maximum static pressure drop on the water side and the air side,
resistance model [16]. The numerical results from CFD are the Dpw, Dpa, and the volume flow rate of air and water, Qw, Qa, the
initial and boundary conditions for FEA. Therefore, part of the resistance coefficients are determined by iteration of CFD model
success of the thermal stresses computations depends on (1)e(3) until pressure drops from numerical results are in good
the precise mapping of solid surface temperature, the wall-based agreement with the bench test values. These coefficients are
fluid film heat transfer coefficient and the internal pressure results considered constants in the simulations. The porosity of the fin side
from CFD to FEA. The mapping is directly related to the meshing of porous region solely depends on the geometry of the radiator.
the physical models. In general, the CFD and FEA software may use Given that the velocities encountered are much less than the
different meshes. In our case, the two meshes were generated from velocity of sound, the two working fluids (air and water) are treated
the same geometry and the same coordinate system in order to
guarantee the correct mapping of results from CFD to FEA without
additional interpolation processes.
Therefore, a time-consuming but very important task is to
generate the two computational meshes. Commercial mesh gener-
ation programs TGRID and PATRAN were used to create volume
meshes for the system, respectively. Predominantly tetrahedral
volume cells (triangle surface meshes) were first generated at the
module header with dimensions 240 mm  154 mm  45 mm (the
top and bottom headers are symmetric). The radiator that was
simulated has 138 tubes and pyramidal cells were used with the
semi-automatically grew prism volume meshes for each tube. The
usage of pyramidal growth of the volume meshes can effectively
decrease the total number of volume meshes required. In the cross-
section of each tube with an area of 18 mm  1.6 mm, 22 grid nodes
were applied to get an acceps mesh resolution. No mesh was
generated for the air side fins. The total cells for the radiator module
that were used are approximately 7 million. Fig. 2 shows the surface
mesh of a module header, which is the top tank of the module.

4. Results, analysis and discussion

Two cases were chosen for the CFD simulation, both at steady Fig. 4. Steady state temperature distribution (K) at the results under forced convection
state: The first one involves hot water flow through tubes (the conditions (the first case).
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Fig. 5. Five slices of the flow field of water from CFD analysis.
as incompressible and, in addition, the air is treated as an ideal gas.
The thermal conductivity, specific heat, viscosity, and other prop-
erties of the fluids and the solid materials are standard inputs and
are given as functions of temperature [7]. Another standard
assumption, which is invariably used in heat exchanger analysis,
was also used that there is no other heat transfer between the
working fluid and the surroundings.
The initial and boundary conditions for the first case (the diesel
engine is on) are given in Table 1. Hot water flows in the vertical
direction (y direction) and the cooler fluid (air) flows in the hori-
zontal direction from left to right side. The only difference in
boundary condition for the second case (diesel engine is off) is that
the temperatures at the water inlet and outlet are lower than in the
hot water case.
The geometric and material parameters of a single module are
summarized in Table 2. Fins at the air side are not included in the
physical model of CFD analysis but included in FEA. Their effect to
the momentum and energy equations (Eqs. (4) and (5)) is repre-
sented by the resistance coefficient and the porosity factor (addi-
tional source terms).
Fig. 6. Water mass flow rate (kg/s) in each tube under the operating scenario. The
maximum difference of magnitude is about 0.0035 kg/s.
The CFD results of the first case are shown in Figs. 3e6. The total
computational time for these computations is 3.5 h with parallel
computing on a cluster, where 4 nodes used for each case with 4
CPUs of 3.2 GHz and 64 GB memory for each node include. Fig. 3
shows the static pressured drop of the water in each tube. It is
observed that the highest pressure drop occurred at the joint
between the top header and the tubes and this is due to the sudden
contraction loss. The pressure drop is a function of the water flow
rate inside each tube and becomes smaller at the bottom header
where a sudden expansion occurs. The non-uniform pressure drop
and the pressure load is an important factor that causes displace-
ment and strain in the radiator. The influence of the non-uniform
pressure drop is more important for the dynamic operating
conditions of the diesel engine. The total pressure drop loss from
the inlet area of the top header to the outlet at the bottom header is
0.56 kPa.
Fig. 4 shows the solid surface temperature distribution for the
forced flow condition. A maximum value of 92  C occurs at the top
header inlet and 82  C was obtained at the bottom header outlet on
Fig. 7. Heat exchanger performance curve and external restriction curve for the water flow.
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S. Mao et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 1438e1446 1443

Fig. 8. Comparison between simulation and experimental data for the thermal stress evolution at a given point on a tube of the radiator.

the water side. The minimum value of the temperature at the up
wind air side is 40  C and the averaged temperature at the down-
wind is about 72.9  C. The results are in a good agreement with the
bench test data. Both field test and bench test results suggest that
non-uniform temperature gradient on the radiator surface is
a significant factor for the creation of large strains and displace-
ment between tubes and fins in the radiators. The numerical results
demonstrate different surface temperature gradients in both the
vertical direction (water flow direction) and the horizontal direc-
tion (air flow direction). The maximum value of wall temperature
gradient occurs at the one top corner of the module.
Fig. 5 shows the water velocity vectors on five planes parallel to
the yez plane and perpendicular to the air flow direction. The
central slide represents a section through the center of the water
inlet. The maximum magnitude of the velocity appears at the
central location of the header. Strong recirculation is generated
before the sudden contraction and the splitting of the flow.
Depending on the design and the geometry of the radiator, each
tube may carry a different mass flow rate. From the point of
structural design, the more uniform the mass flow rate among
tubes the better to reduce strains caused by dynamic pressure
loads. Hence, part of the design effort of heavy-duty radiators is to
uniform flow rate through the tubes.
Fig. 6 depicts the distribution of the mass flow rates in each one
of the tubes. There are 23 columns in the figure and the six red
marks represent the six rows in every column. The maximum mass
flow rate is about 0.0387 kg/s in the middle and the minimum flow
rate is 0.0352 kg/s at the two ends. The range of variation of the
mass flow rates is less than 9% of the average mass flow rate, which
implies that the flow through the tubes is almost uniform.
A detailed finite element analysis showed compressive stresses
near the middle and tensile stresses at the two ends. The FEA is
based on equally distributed mass flow rate in each tube when
considering the total pressure load. Given the results in Fig. 6 and

Fig. 9. Strain change due to the temperature change. The vertical lines separate four phases of operation with different impact of the temperature impact. A cycle is about
20e30 min from the first phase to the last phase.
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1444 S. Mao et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 1438e1446
the slight non-uniformity of the flow, it has been calculated that
this approximation will cause less than 8% difference in the pres-
sure drop across the tubes. The analysis also shows that more than
70% of the restriction is due to the tubes. The restriction curve of
water flow and the heat exchanger performance curve (water heat
transfer) are shown in Fig. 7. The external restriction consists of the
contributions from the radiator, the thermostat and the water
pump. Field tests reported that the highest pressure load is not
from the steady state pressure drop, but from the transient pressure
drop such as the starting of the engine or the sudden change of flow
rate at the inlet.
The solid surface temperature, wall-based fluid film heat
transfer coefficients, and steady state pressure in tubes obtained
from CFD simulations are the initial and boundary conditions for
the FEA of thermal stresses. Because fins are included in the
physical modeling of FEA but not in the CFD model, an interpolation
of the temperature at the surface of the tubes is needed to obtain
the surface temperature of the fin sheets during the FEA compu-
tations. The structural boundaries for the FEA include a vertically
clamped boundary at the water inlet and outlet (the displacements
in the vertical direction) with the other sides being unconstrained.
First order quad and hex elements and a total of 0.4 million
elements have been used for the FEA application. The simulation
has been conducted on the same cluster using 4 nodes and lasted
approximately 3 h of CPU time for each case.
The results for the thermal stress are shown in Figs. 8e11. The FEA
modeling rendered quantitative information about the maximum
stress expected and its location. The maximum stress may become
the cause for possible structural failure and resultant fluid leakage.
Fig. 8 shows the time evolution of the stress at a given point on one
tube during a thermal cycle. The prediction of the peak stress value
from the modeling is in good agreement with the measurement
data. The fact that the development of thermal stress is toward
a local maximum at the initial stage of the thermal cycle is of critical
importance. An effort during the design process should be made to
reduce the magnitude of these stresses and avoid thermal shock-like
Fig. 10. Thermal stresses distribution with pressure load of 0.1 MPa internal pressure. The maximum value appears at the boundary of the side sheets and is shown by the red color.
peaks. The figure also demonstrates that tensile stresses contribute
mostly to the leakage of joints between tubes and headers.
The strain change at two modules in a thermal cycle in a field
test is illustrated in Fig. 9. Four phases represent different operating
stages of a heavy-duty truck. The first phase is a truck shoveling, the
second is the engine idle/truck loading, the third is the traveling
uphill and last phase is the traveling downhill of the truck. The
traces are from field test data. Module 1 and Module 2 were
subjected to different initial condition. It is apparent that strong
thermal pulses (after the engine idle in phase 2, increasing
temperature in phase 3 and decreasing temperature in phase 4)
resulted in large strain levels at the radiator modules (S1 with
2100 rpm and S2 with 2000 rpm of engine speeds). Even the same
engine speed it shows different strain peak and trace for two
modules. This figure demonstrates the non-linear thermal expan-
sion and resultant strains and displacement that may be predicted
by the numerical simulations.
Fig. 10 demonstrates the maximum principal stress distribution
on the radiator module with an initial pressure load of 0.1 MPa
internal pressure. The figure shows only the local area between the
radiator header and the tubes. During the diesel engine run, the
water pressure increase causes higher strain levels. It is generally
considered that the higher stresses appear at the joint between
tubes and the header and also at the beginning of the side sheet. The
FEA results confirmed this prediction and gave quantitative answers
for the value of these stresses. The maximum stress value is about
155 MPa and is shown by the red color. At these sites the possibility
of structural failure is highly probable, which will lead to cracking or
leakage. It is found that the location of maximum stress is not at the
bottom of the header but at the beginning of side sheets. The main
reason for this is the different materials of the tubes and fins and the
significant difference of the thermal expansion properties, which
result in large strains and displacements. A consequence of this
observation is that it is advisable to redesign the side sheet, which is
close to the joint between tubes and the header using different
materials with matching expansion properties.
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S. Mao et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 1438e1446
Fig. 11. Strain change due to the pressure load (water pressure change during diesel engine run). The four engine speeds are included for comparison.
Fig. 11 shows the field test record for the strain trace changes in
Module 3 due to a pressure load under conditions in which the
ambient temperature is very low (10  C) and different engine
speeds conditions are tried. The water pump speed is directly
related to the engine speed (S1, S2, S3 and S4 denote different
engine speeds of 1900 rpm, 1950 rpm, 2200 rpm, and 1700 rpm,
respectively). The different water pump speeds result in different
water pressure rise in the tubes of the radiator module. It was
observed in engines that the strain level reaches a maximum value
simultaneously with the water pressure as the internal water
pressure increases and this observation was confirmed by the
numerical simulation results. Thus, a sudden change in the internal
water pressure load may cause a strain peak at a location and this
may induce cracks and water leakage. By identifying a priori these
locations the numerical analysis will lead to a reduction of the
design cycle time and significant savings by cutting down the
testing of prototypes and new products.
5. Conclusions
The investigation shows that the dual porous medium method
can effectively simulate fluid flow and heat transfer in the radiator
of a heavy-duty cooling system, and provide a reliable and
economic tool for industrial applications, such as complicated
turbulent flow-coupling heat transfer problems. This study
successfully performed a coupling from CFD thermal-fluid results
to FEA thermal stress prediction. A mapping method for the surface
temperature and turbulent wall heat transfer coefficient from CFD
to FEA was developed, which is simple and effective. The study has
taken advantages of both the CFD capacity of accurate modeling
flow-coupling heat transfer and the FEA ability of modeling tran-
sient thermal stresses. Good agreement was observed between
experimental data and simulation results for the resulting strains.
One significant advantage of the procedure used in this study is
that recalculation of the temperature field and the turbulent film
heat transfer coefficient is not required. The temperatures of solid
material (fin, tube and header) have been solved in CFD. The
method is relatively straightforward compared to iterative proce-
dures between the fluid and solid material temperature solution.
When mapping the temperature field obtained from CFD (FLUENT)
analysis to the input data for FEA (ABAQUS), the meshes for FEA can
be different from the meshes used in CFD analysis and this may
1445
save computational time. The only thing to keep in mind is that the
geometry file that is used to generate meshes should be the same
for CFD and FEA tools.
The FEM analysis results directly provide weak spots on the heat
exchanger modules and, hence, guidance to redesign and improve
the junction using an alternative thickness option or a different
material options which lead to significant reduction of thermal
stresses in radiators. The analysis suggests, for example, to avoid
the thermal shock in the radiator by adding an orifice on the
thermostat, by: increasing the tube thickness; making the fin
density coarser; reducing the side sheet in the area close to the
header; or using another method that would make the design more
robust and will avoid joint leakage. Using such a method is
expected to help improve the product useful life and durability and
to increase the product warranty for heavy-duty cooling systems.
In summary, the procedure of coupling the heat transfer simula-
tions with structural analysis provides an economic, robust and
reasonably accurate way for industrial applications.
Acknowledgements
The first author would like to thank Dr. J.-P. Pan for several
useful discussions pertaining to this work. The research of the
fourth author (EEM) has been partly supported by an NSF grant
(HRD-0932339) to the University of Texas at San Antonio.
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