(299b) Application of Chemical Engineering Education In Automotive Thermal Management

Automotive industry has been widely understood to be a dominant field for mechanical and manufacturing engineers. However, the wide scope of chemical engineering education provides chemical engineering students with all essential technical skills required for certain areas of automotive industry. It has been an issue that some chemical engineers usually define what they cannot do, not what they can do. Therefore, this paper identifies non-traditional technical areas, in automotive industry, that chemical engineers can excel at.  Throughout the years, chemical engineers had significant contributions in areas such as fuels, lubricants and emission control. However, due to the stringent requirements for emissions and for fuel economy improvements, new technical areas such as “automotive thermal management” have become more challenging. This requires temperature management of vehicle components, vehicle systems, materials and fluids. During the course of chemical engineering education, most of the emphasis is focused on chemical process industries. However, several examples from automotive applications can be presented to the students as typical chemical engineering problems. Since transportation is a part of our daily activities, it will be much easier and more interesting for students to realize the significance of these applications since they interact with our daily life. Therefore, student’s attention is easily captured during the lecture or exercise. A high level of focus and interest is usually observed when reference is made to real life examples that students can relate to. In addition, these examples point the students toward a wider range of technical fields and career opportunities in automotive industry.

In this paper, examples will be given in the areas of vehicle instrumentation and testing, exhaust after-treatment systems, fuel system thermal management and kinetics of material thermal degradation. 

• The basic energy balance around a thermocouple junction and the assumptions made to determine thermocouple dynamic response are usually covered in undergraduate programs. However, this problem can be also presented to the students in case if these assumptions are violated. These assumptions may lead to significant errors in thermocouple readings during actual vehicle testing unless certain installation procedures are considered. Examples will be presented and estimates of potential errors will be evaluated.
• The after-treatments systems including catalytic converters, Diesel Particulate Filters (DPF) and the Selective Catalytic Reduction systems (SCR) will be presented in relationship to chemical engineering fundamentals. This problem can be analyzed, as a series of reactors, using any of the commercial flow-sheet s simulation tools.
• Distillation problems which are taught in chemical engineering undergraduate programs are typically steady state. While distillation process is very important for chemical and petroleum industries, it has also significant applications in the automotive world. Thermal analysis of gasoline fuel tank is often required in order to estimate fuel temperature and fuel vapor emissions. This problem becomes more interesting since it is transient in nature. The fuel mass is continuously decreasing as long as the engine is running.  The more volatile hydrocarbons will evaporate first and therefore the fuel composition will be always changing. The rate of heat exchange between the fuel tank and the surrounding environment is also transient. Analysis of this problem requires application of heat transfer models, thermodynamics of hydrocarbon mixtures, flash calculations and mass transfer.
• Basic principles of chemical kinetics are also used to determine the rate of thermal degradation of rubber and polymeric materials. The rate of thermal degradation can be related to the material temperature through the activation energy of each material. Therefore, an estimate of material performance under different driving conditions and at various ambient temperatures can be estimated.

To serve automotive industry needs, it is recommended that an undergraduate course in the area of “automotive thermal management” be developed. The course should be offered as an elective course for senior undergraduate and graduate students. Due to the potential increase in production of hybrid and electric vehicles, the proposed course should also include battery thermal management, fuel cells, and light weight materials.