Thermal interference-aware design and co-optimization of stacked condenser-radiator modules for electric vehicles

초록

With the ongoing transition toward electric vehicles (EVs) in the transportation sector, the demand for efficient vehicle thermal management systems has rapidly surged. However, the prevailing reliance on isolated singlecomponent analyses in existing literature often overlooks critical thermal interactions between adjacent heat exchangers, thereby limiting practical applicability. To address this gap, the current study comprehensively analyzes the thermal interference of a stacked module comprising a microchannel condenser and a power electronics (PE) cooling radiator in EVs. A numerical model based on the epsilon-NTU method was developed to predict the performance of heat exchangers and validated against experimental data. By coupling the individual heat exchanger models, the module-level performance and the thermal degradation of the radiator by the upstream condenser were quantitatively evaluated. To mitigate this thermal deterioration, a co-optimization approach was proposed to simultaneously optimize the designs of the two heat exchangers, maximizing the radiator heat transfer rate and minimizing the effective air pressure drop while maintaining an equivalent condenser performance. Compared to the baseline, the optimal configuration improved the radiator heat transfer rate by 15.8% under strict air pressure drop constraints. This enhancement was further amplified to 37.5% by integrating a spatial offset arrangement with the optimized design. Moreover, dynamic evaluation incorporating transient PE heat generation demonstrated the superiority of the optimized design, enabling substantially more stable coolant temperatures under realistic driving conditions. These findings highlight the feasibility of optimization strategies that explicitly account for inter-component interactions, with the model-based prediction suggesting potential improvements for EV thermal management.

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