Reduction of energy consumption for tire test room through efficient heat management

Abstract

Maintaining temperature stability and minimizing the time taken to reach the desired test temperature range in tire test rooms were challenges faced by Continental Tyre Technology Centre Malaysia. Heat generated during the endurance test increased the temperature of the room and if it exceeded the test temperature range, a restart of the test is required which leads to greater energy consumption. The objective of this study was to maintain temperature stability during testing and to reach the desired test temperature range efficiently during start up. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation through ANSYS Fluent was performed using information obtained from Continental. The heat distribution of the heater and the air-conditioner, and the airflow of the air-conditioner in the existing tire test room were investigated through simulation. Based on the results, a modified version of the tire test room was simulated to investigate for possible improvements. From this simulation, recommendations were proposed to Continental. The findings showed that optimizing the layout and location of the air-conditioner yielded improvements in the cooling rate at certain regions while a more suitable location for heater reduced the time taken to heat up certain regions.