A study on the comprehensive heat dissipation performance of new louvered fins for automotive radiator

Louvered fins have a significant impact on the comprehensive heat dissipation performance of automotive radiator. To enhance the comprehensive heat dissipation performance of louvered fins, this study improved the design of fin’s cross-sectional shape, proposed leaf-shaped louvered fins, and numerically simulated the effect of different cross-sectional shapes on the comprehensive heat dissipation performance of louvered fins. The results show that among the four studied cases (parallelogram, airfoil, tapered, and leaf), the leaf-shaped louvered fins exhibit the best performance. Compared with the traditional parallelogram louvered fins (which have the worst performance), the Nu shows little change, but the pressure drop decreases by 17.2%, and the PEC increases by 3.71%. To further improve the comprehensive heat dissipation performance of the leaf-shaped louvered fins, this study also optimized their structural parameters using RSM. The optimization results indicate that when Angle=15.9°, Length=1.25 mm, Width=0.1 mm, the optimized leaf-shaped fins show a 14% increase in Nu, a 16.04% increase in PEC, and a 5.1% decrease in pressure drop compared with the parallelogram fins. These findings provide valuable insights for the improvement of the comprehensive heat dissipation performance of louvered fins.