Numerical Heat Transfer Investigation of Straight Cooling Fin Arrangement In In-Wheel Electric Motor Housing

• Main Authors: M. Sabri Sidik, N. Afiq Azidin, M. Rezal, Faiza M. Nasir, M. K. Abdullah, UniKL MSI
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: Straight fin; In-wheel electric motor; Heat transfer analysis; Maximum temperature; Total heat transfer
• Online Access: http://localhost/xmlui/handle/123456789/8980
• Institution: Universiti Kuala Lumpur

In-wheel electric motor is a latest and advance technology, where the motor is integrated within the wheels to drive the vehicle. It eliminates the need for the conventional engine, transmission differential and other power train components. Instead of several advantages offered by the in-wheel electric motor, it produces a lot of heat during its operation, where it downgrades the performance. Therefore, cooling of the electric motor is highly required to keep the electric motor operation in best possible level. Integrating fin into the motor housing is an option of the cooling techniques offered. Nevertheless, fin design on the motor housing need to be studied in order to ensure effective thermal management, optimum output power, reliable and safe operation to the user. In this paper, the effect of fin height, width and spacing of straight cooling fin arrangement has been investigated for the optimum heat transfer. The fin has been modeled in CATIA, while computational fluid dynamic tool namely ANSYS FLUENT 14 is used to predict the performance on its heat transfer. It is found that the best performance of the fin is referred to the straight fin arrangement with 2.6 mm in height, 3.75 mm in width and spacing between fins of 6.5 mm. It significantly reduces the temperature, while keeping up the heat transfer as much as 49.4% and 264%, respectively compared to the model without considering fin design.