Vehicle thermal management: a model-based approach

Cooling system design has a crucial role in defining engine performance, operational limits and thermal comfort. Many further improvements with respect to the actual situation can be obtained through a more accurate control of an-board thermal needs. To this new interest the definition of new technical specifications must follow. The technical literature, however, seems not fully satisfying this need, not focusing on the influence of these technical specifications on system design, reliability and costs. In this paper the authors present a contribution in this direction, showing the capabilities of an active intelligent management of the engine cooling system. This can be obtained through different control strategies, strongly diversified for their cost-performance ratio. The potentiality of a model-based controller has been also investigated and compared with the correspondent closed-loop controller.