These slides were presented at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

Simulation departments in manufacturing companies are often focused on the performing of many repetitive activities while working on the development of selected types of products. This work is most often related to preparing geometry, using a simulation template, creating a mesh, setting boundary conditions and physics, collecting simulation data and creating reports - according to standards. Automation of repetitive processes can significantly reduce the engineer's working time needed to obtain results and devote it to creative work. It also allows for minimizing the risk of errors in the simulation, which in consequence will also save time. Valeo Power division focuses on designing heat exchangers for heat management in cars. During the product development phase of the car radiator, which is the most common heat exchanger, two basic CFD simulations are performed - thermal performance and thermal shock simulation. According to the standards, Valeo radiators consist of headers, tanks, side plates, air fins and tubes. All the parts, as well as working fluids - coolant and air are parts of CFD simulation. Valeo builds radiators with different tubes and fins technologies, depending on the project's needs. Due to complex geometry of air fin and tube direct simulation is not applicable in industrial use. A simplification is needed to reduce simulation model size. One way to achieve that is to replace complex geometry by characteristics of pressure drop and heat transfer for tube and air fin. Characteristics are calculated first on the submodels and applied after to the global CFD model with simplified geometry of tube and air fin. Calculation of characteristics, preparation of the geometry with special naming convention, creation of reports according to the standards are main stages of the thermal performance simulation of the radiator. For thermal shock simulation there is also a temperature mapping stage for the structural simulation. All these steps involving repetitive and schematic operations performed by an engineer can be replaced by an automatic process. This paper presents a fully automated CFD simulation process of thermal performance and thermal shock for automotive radiators. The only manual operation within the process is CAD geometry preparation and extraction of internal fluid volumes. This process in Catia is supported by the VBA script which guides the engineer and automatically creates surface geometry according to the naming convention. Boundary conditions and specifications are provided by the engineer throughout the graphic user interface in the excel file. At this stage simulation input files, including StarCCM+ simulation file and java macro with mesh parameters, simulation type boundary conditions, etc. are created. Finally, Simcenter Star CCM+ managed by the previously created Java input files runs the simulation from scratch, creates PowerPoint and Excel reports in batch mode on the simulation cluster after calculation.The automated process significantly shortens the time from receiving the necessary input data to deliver results in the form of reports and temperature maps to the project.