To automate and make simulation set-up easy and simple ICON has set up a cloud-based platform. This platform allows the user to set up, run and manage multiple design iterations to find the optimum solution. For this an App has been developed for efficient thermal CFD simulation of the brake disc cooling flows including its thermal effects, especially the prediction of the heat transfer coefficients. This allows analysis of the thermal performance of different cooling designs in short timeframes and increases the accuracy of thermal prediction to optimize the design’s cooling potential at a minimum dimension of the disc. Once a design has been defined, ICON’s novel BAF boundary conditions can be applied with advanced thermal models to integrate into a full vehicle model, to further refine the design in the final environment. This boundary condition allows to model the thermal distribution of the disc heat fluxes, while rotating this on a static CFD mesh. This helps to keep the run time of a simulation small while the accuracy remains high and thus makes it possible to run more design optimizations in the same timeframe. Moreover, using conjugate heat transfer not only the disc itself, can be assessed, but furthermore the domain can be expanded to predict the temperatures for example of the calliper, brake fluid, pistons or any heat shields surrounding the disc. The simulation model considers heat conduction, convection as well as radiation. With the help of ICON’s advanced tools, the set-up of this complex thermal simulation can be made simple and enables simulating minutes of real time disc heat up and cool down cycles on a full vehicle simulation in a matter of hours. To demonstrate these methods on a non-confidential geometry, ICON has used the AeroSUV model provided by ECARA and modified it to include a realistic brake cooling system and front corner geometry.

ICON: Mr. Christian Taucher