Cooling performance evaluation of height-downsized front end module for pedestrian protection

The front end module (FEM) needs enough space from hood to absorb the energy from any pedestrian collision. The FEM with downsized cooling module for pedestrian protection is important to reduce the severity of pedestrian injury. When a vehicle collision happens, the FEM with downsized cooling module is required to reduce the risk of injury to the upper legs of adults and the heads of children. In this study, the performance of cooling module to cool the engine was investigated under 25% height reduction. The heat dissipation and pressure drop characteristics have been experimentally studied with the variation of coolant flow rate, air inlet velocity and A/C operation (on/off) for the downsized cooling module. The results indicated that the cooling performance was about 94% level compared to that of the conventional cooling module. Therefore, we concluded that the cooling module had a good performance, and expected that the cooling module could meet the same cooling performance as conventional cooling module through optimization of components efficiency. This paper also deals with the development of FEM with downsized cooling module for the cooling performance level in vehicles. In the test of front end module’s heat dissipation performance, the prototype presented about 15% decrease under the conditions of all the vehicle speeds than that of conventional one.