Liquid cooling cycle application

Application Assets & Examples Tutorial

A liquid cooling cycle consist of a pump, heat sources and sinks, and the piping and valves to direct liquid to where it is needed. The liquid cooling cycle is not a refrigeration cycle per-se because it cannot transport heat against the temperature gradient. As it pumps a practically incompressible fluid in a closed loop, it can only transport or convect heat from one component to another.

During early design, a liquid cooling cycle can be run in steady-state using Liquid Cooling Library. This is can be convenient in studying the performance and supervisory control of a system. Then, transients can be less relevant. Select components have sizing functionality, which allows imposing design intent (e.g., piping network branch mass flow rate) instead of all component geometry parameters. Note that not all component models in Liquid Cooling Library support the steady-state simulation mode; refer to this description for details.

In any design phase, the transient behavior of a liquid cooling cycle can also be simulated using Liquid Cooling Library. This can be critical during the early and detailed design, for instance for the development of automatic controls and integration activities (e.g., hardware-in-the-loop in verification and validation).

Heat exchanger models are structured by the geometric design:

• fin and tube
• plate heat exchanger

and the fluids:

• liquid-to-air
• refrigerant-to-liquid

Two types of heat exchanger models are available.

• Liquid Cooling Library itself contains medium fidelity models based on generic geometry parameterization such as heat transfer area and hydraulic diameter.
• Heat Exchanger Library contains highly detailed that are parameterized via a geometry parameters of fins, flat tubes, plate fins, tubes and so on. These also support various discretization options and inhomogeneous impingement boundary conditions.

Models of electrical drives, for instance for pumps, can be found in Electrification Library. See the Propulsion and Power application for more details.