Controller cooling of an electric vehicle (EV): An analytical and CFD simulation study

Abstract

This paper presents the design of the controller cooling device of an electric vehicle. The heat generated by a typical EV controller during the operation was calculated which is considered as targeted heat to be removed by the cooling device. A liquid cooled plate heat exchanger was designed and the heat transfer through this plate heat exchanger was evaluated analytically and simulated by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software namely ANSYS FLUENT version 12.0. Two fluids were considered for this study, i.e., water and ethylene glycol. The results of both approaches, i.e., analytical and CFD simulation were compared. The results revealed that water at a mass flow rate of 0.03 kg/s and ethylene glycol at a mass flow rate of 0.20 kg/s could remove the targeted heat from the controller.