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Design of Experiments Enabled CFD Approach forOptimizing Cooling Fan

Performance

Conference Paper  in  SAE Technical Papers · April 2014

DOI: 10.4271/2014-01-0658

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Design of Experiments Enabled CFD Approach for
Optimizing Cooling Fan Performance
Vinod Kumar Srinivasa, Renjith S, and Biswadip Shome
Tata Technologies Ltd.
CITATION: Srinivasa, V., S, R., and Shome, B., "Design of Experiments Enabled CFD Approach for Optimizing Cooling Fan
Performance," SAE Technical Paper 2014-01-0658, 2014, doi:10.4271/2014-01-0658.
Copyright © 2014 SAE International
Abstract
Increasing demands on engine power to meet increased load
carrying capacity and adherence to emission norms have
necessitated the need to improve thermal management system
of the vehicle. The efficiency of the vehicle cooling system
strongly depends on the fan and fan-shroud design and,
designing an optimum fan and fan-shroud has been a
challenge for the designer. Computational Fluid Dynamics
(CFD) techniques are being increasingly used to perform
virtual tests to predict and optimize the performance of fan and
fan-shroud assembly. However, these CFD based optimization
are mostly based on a single performance parameter. In
addition, the sequential choice of input parameters in such
optimization exercise leads to a large number of CFD
simulations that are required to optimize the performance over
the complete range of design and operating envelope. As a
result, the optimization is carried out over a limited range of
design and operating envelope only.
In this paper, a Design of Experiments (DoE) based CFD
approach has been used to optimize the fan and fan-shroud
design of a cooling pack system. The input design variables of
Fan Immersion ratio, Fan to Core distance and Shroud
Chamfer Length ratio were considered in this study. The
performance output variables of mass flow rate, fan power, and
velocity uniformity in the radiator core were predicted. The
Central Composite Design (CCD) based DoE approach was
used to design the layout of the CFD simulations with the goal
of maximizing airflow through the fan, minimize the fan power
requirement, and maximize the velocity uniformity in the
radiator core. The results from these designed set of CFD
simulations were used to generate a response surface that
linked the input and output variables with a 2nd order accuracy
transfer function which was then used to optimize the fan and
fan-shroud design.
2014-01-0658
Published 04/01/2014
Introduction
Modern cooling systems consist of several heat exchangers
such as, condenser, radiator, and oil coolers within the engine
compartment that are stacked together. To dissipate the heat
carried by the engine coolant, lubricating oil, turbocharger, and
air conditioner, a cooling fan is required to produce a
sufficiently uniform flow of cooling air through the stack of
these heat exchangers. Adequate performance of the cooling
fan is important for optimal functioning of these heat
exchangers. In particular, for engines that are mounted on
stationery equipment like compressors, generator sets,
industrial machinery, adequate performance of the cooling fan
becomes a critical requirement as this stationery equipments
do not have the advantage of the additional ram air which can
be used for cooling as in automotive applications. Thus, the
entire airflow that is required to dissipate the heat from these
heat exchangers needs to be provided by the cooling fan itself.
The key design objective for optimizing the performance of a
cooling fan is to maximize the mass flow that can be delivered
by the fan with a minimum power requirement. In addition, the
airflow delivered by the fan to the heat exchangers needs to be
uniform over the face of the heat exchanger core so that the
entire heat exchanger core can be utilized for effective
dissipation of heat. In particular, axial flow fan tends to push
the air parallel to the axis of the fan which results in lack of air
flow at the corners of the heat exchanger core. Thus, the
velocity uniformity index is often used a quantitative metric for
evaluating the utilization of the heat exchanger core for heat
dissipation.
There are various factors which affect the performance of the
axial fan. Some of these factors are pitch angle, number of
blades, tip clearance between the blade tip and the shroud,
location of maximum blade thickness, and fan blade chord
angle [1]. Effect of these variables on the fan performance has
been investigated using Six Sigma methodology [2].
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The relationship between the key fan performance
characteristic variables (such as mass flow of air delivered, fan
power requirement, and velocity uniformity index) and the fan
design variables (such as fan blade pitch angle, number of
blades, tip clearance between the blade tip and the shroud) is
multi-dimensional and complex. Due to the complexity that
exists for such multi-dimensional relationship, simple statistical
techniques like linear regression analysis are inadequate to
describe the relationship between the performance variables
and the design variables. To describe such complex
relationship which is a key requirement to understand the
functional dependence of the performance parameters on the
design variables, Response Surface Methods (RSM) have
been used in the past for diverse applications ranging from
enzyme cultivation process optimization [3], chemical process
industry application [4], to weld optimization studies [5].
Another advantage of using RSM is that the response surface
generated can be used to study the inter-linkages that exist
between the design variables which can then be further used
for optimization of the design variables.
The effect of these three design variables on fan air flow rate
(Q), fan power (P), and velocity uniformity index (UI) are
investigated using a CFD model and statistically analyzed for
optimization using a Central Composite based Design of
Experiments technique with a goal to maximize Q, maximize
UI, and minimize P. The fan speed was kept constant at a
value of 1700 rpm in this study, and thus, its effect on the fan
flow rate, fan power, and velocity uniformity index was not
considered as part of this study. The rationale for keeping the
fan speed constant is that fan speed for is usually dictated by
the electric or hydraulic power that is available to drive the fan
and this is usually not varied while optimizing the fan and fan
shroud design.

In the past, several authors have worked on the front end

cooling simulation. However, the majority of these front end
cooling studies [6], [7], [8][9] has emphasized on under-hood
thermal simulation rather than on fan-shroud optimization or
heat exchanger performance. There has been some work in
using CFD based prediction models for thermal
characterization of the front end cooling module. These studies
[10][11], [12] have used CFD models to evaluate condenser-
fan-radiator module (CFRM) against the conventional
condenser-radiator-fan module (CRFM) at a fixed vehicle Figure 1. A) Cooling pack assembly. B) Design variables chosen for
optimization.
velocity. However, these studies did not present any
information on the fan-fan shroud optimization or heat
exchanger performance. Numerical Methods
In this study, a steady-state incompressible three-dimensional
There exist several studies which has used techniques such as CFD analysis is used to simulate the cooling system using the
multi-objective optimization methodology [13], genetic commercial STAR-CCM+ software [17]. The turbulence was
algorithms [14], neural networks [15], and RSM [16] for modeled using the standard k-ε model with wall functions [18].
optimizing centrifugal fans. The multi-objective optimization
methods using neural networks and genetic algorithms, The heat exchangers were simulated by treating them as
although mathematically sophisticated, require intensive porous media. Explicitly modeling of the geometric features
computational efforts and are prone to finding local optima inside the heat exchangers was not attempted as it would lead
rather than global optima. To the best of the authors' to an extremely large model with significant computational
knowledge, the use of DoE based RSM methodology has not overheads. The porous media approach consists of
been used to investigate and optimize the performance of a representing the pressure drop per unit thickness of the heat
cooling system comprising of heat exchanger and axial fan. exchanger core as
The key advantages that a DoE based RSM optimization
methodology offers as compared to other optimization
techniques is that it is computationally more efficient and is
(1)
less prone to finding local optima.
Where, ΔP is the pressure drop across the heat exchanger
In this study, a cooling system comprising of three heat core, δ is the thickness of the heat exchanger core, and U is
exchangers and a pusher axial fan with shroud is considered. the flow velocity in the heat exchanger core. The constants A
Cooling systems such as these are typically used in industrial and B are typically obtained through a curve-fit of the ΔP
and automotive applications. The cooling system considered versus U data that is measured experimentally. The above
here is shown in Figure 1. The design variables which are pressure drop relationship in the heat exchanger is modeled as
considered in this study are Immersion ratio (IR), Fan-to-Core a source term in the momentum equations that are being
distance (F2C) and Shroud Chamfer Length ratio (CLR). These solved.
variables are defined as IR = a/b, F2C = c, and CLR = L1/L2
where the definitions of a, b, and c are shown in Figure 1.
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The fan rotation was modeled using Multiple Reference Frame
(MRF) approach [19]. The use of MRF approach allows
simulation of transient phenomena, which is rotation of the fan
in this case, to be treated as a steady-state phenomenon. The
use of MRF results in additional acceleration terms which are
accounted as source terms in the momentum equations that
are being solved. The MRF approach does not account for the
relative motion of the moving zone with respect to the adjacent
stationary zones, as the mesh remains fixed for the
computation. While the MRF approach is clearly an
approximation, it still provides a reasonable description of the
flow within acceptable engineering accuracy [20], [21], [22].
The other approach which is relatively more accurate and
involves moving the mesh as a function of time is
computationally expensive as it requires a transient calculation
with a fine mesh size. In addition, the moving mesh approach
is difficult to adopt for complex industrial geometries, such as
the one considered in this study.
Computational Domain and Boundary
Conditions
The CFD simulation used in this study employed a
computational domain, shown in Figure 2. The extent of the
domain was chosen as 4.5D × 9D × 5D where D is the fan
diameter. The chosen domain size was large enough to
prevent any re-circulatory flows at the domain boundaries. The
domain included a partition wall at the cooling system mounting
location as shown in Figure 2. As the focus of this study is on
the fan, fan-shroud, and heat exchanger performance,
components such as engine block, turbo chargers and other
components which are located upstream of the fan are not
included in this study. This enabled a reduction in the
geometric complexity of the model and resulted in a quicker
turn-around time for the CFD simulations.
Figure 2. Computational domain used for the simulation.
The mesh used in this study is a hybrid mesh consisting of
polyhedral in fan region; prismatic layers on the fan blade
surfaces, and hexahedra in the heat exchangers. A cut section
view showing the mesh cross-section is shown in Figure 3. As
seen in Figure 3, the mesh size was controlled to provide a fine
mesh around the fan hub, fan blade tip, and fan blade leading
and trailing edges as these areas typically encounter large
velocity gradients and a fine mesh is required to resolve these
large gradients.
Figure 3. Cross-sectional view of the mesh (View A: Cross sectional
view shows the refined mesh around cooling system, View B and C:
Enlarged view of the cross section showing the volume mesh through
the cooling package and fan).
The MRF model which is used in this study to model the
rotating fan requires defining a finite region which uses a
rotating frame of reference as compared to the rest of the
computational domain which uses the stationery inertial frame
of reference. This rotating region which encompasses the fan
hub and fan blades is shown in Figure 4. The fan blades were
meshed with an average cell size of 8 mm with the fan blade
tip and edges were meshed with a finer cell size of 2 mm. To
capture the boundary layer effect, 4 layers of prismatic cells
with a first layer cell height of 0.25 mm and a growth rate of 1.5
was used. This ensured that the y+ value remained within the
range of 30 to 50 as required by the k-ε turbulence model with
wall functions that was used in this study.
A average cell size of 20 mm was used at the inner region B
shown in Figure 3 and the mesh was grown outwards using a
growth ratio of 1.5. This resulted in a total cell count of around
4.29 million cells. To test the mesh independence of the
results, a refined mesh was generated for the region B by
reducing the average mesh size from 20 mm to 15 mm which
resulted in a total cell count of around 8.27 million cells. The
difference in the predicted fan flow rate and the fan power was
less than 1.1% and 0.5%, respectively. Based on this result,
the coarser mesh of 4.29 million cells was used through the
study.
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Figure 4. Details of Fan Region (View A: MRF region that is modeled in a rotating frame of reference. View B and C: Mesh cross-section illustrating the
MRF region that is filled with polyhedral mesh with prismatic boundary layers on the fan blades. View D: Fine mesh with four layers of cells across
2-5mm (edge to blade center) blade thickness used in blade tips, leading and trailing edges are captured with fine mesh as compared to the rest of the
surfaces. View E: Cross sectional view showing prismatic boundary layers on fan blade surfaces).

The computational model was solved using a pressure
boundary condition of standard atmospheric pressure at the
inlet and outlet face of the domain. The side walls of the
domain were modeled with a zero-shear boundary condition to
prevent any boundary layer growth on those surfaces. The
rotational speed of the fan was set at 1700 rpm and no-slip
velocity boundary conditions were used at all walls. The
physical properties of air were treated as constant and
corresponded to those at a room temperature of 298 K.
The CFD solution was iterated till the mass flow across the
heat exchanger changed by less than 1%. From the converged
CFD solution, the fan flow rate, fan power, and velocity
uniformity index were post-processed and analyzed. In this
study, the velocity uniformity index is defined as:
(2)
Where, is the surface average of velocity , is the face
value of the selected scalar i.e., velocity and is the area of a
face. A value of unity of the velocity uniformity index represents
a perfectly uniform flow over the heat exchanger core.
involving a significantly increased number of experiments. In
this study, a three-factor, three-level Central Composite Design
(CCD) is used to determine the optimal factors of cooling
system assembly comprising of heat exchanger cores, fan, and
fan-shroud. The CCD based DoE approach used in this study
allowed the authors to employ a quadratic model to capture the
non-linearity in the interactions between the independent and
dependent variables.
This study involved three independent variables namely, Fan
immersion ratio, Fan-to-core distance, and Shroud chamfer
length ratio. Each of these independent variable had three
levels (−1, 0, and +1) which could be interpreted as minimum,
nominal, and maximum value of the variable in consideration.
The three-level combination of the three independent variable
resulted in a set of 20 experiments with each experiment being
a unique CFD simulation model. The values of the dependent
variables associated with these experiments are shown in
Table 1.
Table 1. Coded values of independent variables.

Although it would have been ideal to compare the CFD

predictions with experimental data for validating the CFD
methodology, but this comparison was not performed in this
study as the cooling system that is the subject of this study is
in an early conceptual design stage and thus does not have
any experimental data available. The comparison of the
experimental data for the optimal design configuration with the
predicted CFD results for fan flow rate and fan power is a
subject of a future study when such experimental data
becomes available.
Results
Based on the design matrix layout described in Table 1, CFD
simulations were carried out and the values of the responses
Central Composite Based Design of (i.e. fan flow rate, fan power, and velocity uniformity index)
Experiments were obtained for each of the combinations. These results are
The Central Composite Design (CCD) is an effective Design of shown in Table 2.
Experiments (DoE) methodology that is ideal for sequential
experimentation involving a least number of experiments. Based on these results, statistical analysis was carried out
Although there are other DoE techniques, such as the full- using Minitab software [23] to build the response surface and
factorial design; however, the CCD design was chosen in the derive the transfer functions.
this study as it provides the methodology for building a second
order (quadratic) model for the response variable without
needing to use a complete three-level full factorial experiment
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Table 2. Design matrix with responses. The response surface and contour plots of the fan flow rate
showing its dependence on the independent variables are
shown in Figure 5.

Second-order quadratic transfer functions were used to

express the transfer function that linked the dependent
variables of fan flow rate, fan power, and velocity uniformity
index as functions of the independent variables. These transfer
functions are described as:

(3)

(4)

Figure 5. Response surface and contour plots for fan flow rate.

The response surface and the contour plots shown in Figure 5

(5)
The R2 correlation index ranged from 0.845 to 0.994 which
indicated that 84.5% to 99.4% of the data is described by the
transfer functions described above.
indicate that the fan flow rate is maximized by a combination of
maximum F2C and IR values but the dependence of the fan
flow rate on the CLR variable is weak. Thus, to maximize the
fan flow rate, the design should consist of highest feasible
values of F2C and IR. Similar response surface and contour
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plots showing the dependence of fan power and velocity quality characteristics, with one of them outside of some
uniformity index on the independent variables are shown in desired limits, is completely unacceptable. The method finds
Figure 6 and Figure 7, respectively. operating conditions that provide the most desirable response
values.

Figure 6. Response surface and contour plots for fan power.

Figure 7. Response surface and contour plots for velocity uniformity
Based on the response surfaces that were developed, an index.
optimization exercise was carried out using the desirability
approach [23], [24]. The desirability function approach [24] is
one of the most widely used methods in industry for the
optimization of multiple response processes. It is based on the
idea that the quality of a product or process that has multiple
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For each response yi(x), a desirability function di(yi) assigns independent variables. For instance, a 20% change in IR, F2C,
numbers between 0 and 1 to the possible values of yi, with and CLR leads to a 4.9%, 2.3%, and 1.6% change in fan flow
di(yi) = 0 representing a completely undesirable value of yi and rate, fan power, and velocity uniformity index, respectively.
di(yi) = 1 representing a completely desirable response value.
The individual values of desirability are then combined using Table 4. Comparison of Response Surface Results and CFD Results
the geometric mean to provide the overall desirability of the for the Off Design Configurations.
response variable. In the current study, mass flow rate and
uniformity index were proposed to be maximized and fan
power was proposed to be minimized.

The optimization exercise suggested that the optimum design

conditions of maximum fan flow rate, maximum velocity
uniformity index, and minimum fan power is fulfilled by IR value
of 100%, F2C value of 210 mm and a CLR value of 0.8. It so
happens, as a matter of coincidence, that the proposed
optimum value based on the three levels of factors that were
considered in this study is one of the design points. Although,
the resolution could have been improved by including
additional levels in the factors, but that option was not pursued
in this study in order to keep the number of experiments to a
minimum possible value to conserve model building and
computational efforts.

To verify that the optimization and predictions based on the

response surface are accurate, the CFD simulation was
performed at the suggested values of IR, F2C, and CLR. The
results obtained from the response surface method and the
CFD simulations are compared in Table 3. As seen in Table 3,
the results obtained from the response surface model differ by
less than 0.21% from those obtained using the CFD simulation.

Table 3. Comparison of Response Surface Results and CFD Results

for the Optimal Design Configuration.

Figure 8. Sensitivity of Fan Flow, Fan Power, and Velocity Uniformity

Index to Changes in IR, F2C, and CLR.

The sensitivity analysis performed above can also be used to

In addition, couple of off-design configurations was considered
in this study to verify the accuracy of the transfer functions
generated from the RSM. As seen in Table 4, the results
obtained from the RSM differ by less than 1.6% from those
obtained using the CFD simulation.
Next, the transfer functions obtained from the RSM study and
shown in Equation 3 through 5 were used to perform a
sensitivity analysis of the dependent variables of fan flow rate,
fan power, and velocity uniformity index on the independent
variables of IR, F2C, and CLR. Figure 8 shows the variation in
the predicted fan flow rate, fan power, and velocity uniformity
index. Figure 8 shows that the fan flow rate is most sensitive to
changes in the independent variables and the velocity
uniformity index is the least sensitive to the changes in
derive a tolerance of the predicted variables of fan flow rate,
fan power, and velocity uniformity index given a tolerance of
the independent variables of IR, F2C, and CLR. Based on an
assumption of a nominal ±10% tolerance in IR, F2C, and CLR,
the tolerance on fan flow rate, fan power, and velocity
uniformity index are ±1.9%, ±1.2%, and ±0.9%, respectively.
Conclusions
A DoE based CFD approach has been used to optimize the fan
and fan-shroud design of a cooling pack system. CFD
simulations are carried out in conjunction with a Central
Composite Design approach to derive the response surface
which is based on quadratic transfer functions. The response
surface that was developed was used to optimize the
Immersion ratio (IR), Fan-to-Core distance (F2C) and Shroud
Chamfer Length Ratio (CLR) such that the fan flow rate and
velocity uniformity index on the heat exchanger face are
maximized and the fan power requirement is minimized. The
optimum design point suggested by the response surface
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methodology was verified by performing the CFD simulation for
the optimum design point condition and comparing the two
results.
The results from this study show that response surface
methodology can be successfully applied not only to optimize
the cooling fan and fan-shroud parameters but also to derive
the sensitivity and associated tolerances of the dependent
variables based on changes and tolerances in the independent
variables.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the management at TATA
Technologies Limited for providing the permission to publish
this paper. The support and encouragement provided is deeply
appreciated.

Definitions/Abbreviations
CCD - Central Composite Design
CFD - Computational Fluid Dynamics
CLR - Shroud chamfer length ratio
DoE - Design of Experiments
F2C - Fan-to-core distance
IR - Immersion ratio
MRF - Multiple reference frame

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