SUMMARY

Industrial and military vehicles employ cooling systems that address passenger cooling and auxiliary cooling loads ranging from a few Watts to 50 kW or more. Such systems are typically powered using vapor-compression cooling systems that either directly supply cold air to the various locations, or cool an intermediate single-phase coolant closed loop, which in turn serves as the coolant for the passenger cabins and auxiliary loads such as electronics modules. Efforts are underway to enhance the performance of such systems, and also to develop more light weight and compact systems that would remove high heat fluxes. The distributed cooling configuration offers the advantage of a smaller refrigerant system package. The heat transfer between the intermediate fluid and air or with the auxiliary heat loads can be fine tuned through the control of flow rates and component sizes and controls to maintain tight tolerances on the cooling performance. In this study, a versatile simulation platform for a wide variety of direct and indirectly coupled cooling systems was developed to enable comparison of different component geometries and system configurations based on operating requirements and applicable design constraints. Components are modeled at increasing levels of complexity ranging from specified closest approach temperatures for key components to models based on detailed heat transfer and pressure drop models. These components of varying complexity can be incorporated into the system model as desired and trade-off analyses on system configurations performed. Employing this platform as a screening, comparison, and optimization tool, a number of conventional vapor-compression and distributed cooling systems were analyzed to determine the efficacy of the distributed cooling scheme in mobile cooling applications.