System-level Modeling of Cooling Networks in All Electric Ships

Abstract

A Thermal management simulation tool is required to rapidly and accurately evaluates and mitigates the adverse effects of increased heat loads in the initial stages of design in all electric ships. By reducing the dimension of Navier-Stokes and energy equations, we have developed one-dimensional partial differential equations models that simulate time-dependent hydrodynamics and heat transport in a piping network system. Beside the steady-state response, the computational model enables us to predict the transient behavior of the cooling system, when the operating conditions are time-variant. To accurately predict the impact of cooling system on temperature distribution at different ship's locations/components and vice versa, we coupled our computational tool with vemESRDC developed at Florida State University. We verified our implementation with several benchmark problems.