An ad hoc procedure based on Computational Fluid Dynamics algorithms has been developed in order to evaluate the thermal behavior of automotive rear lamps and to improve their concept and design. The thermal analysis was performed with the commercial computational fluid dynamics package ANSYS CFX-11. The steady-state analysis accounts for natural convection flow and radiation within the entire fluid domain. Conduction is taken into account within all the rear lamp components (lens, bulbs, …) and radiation is modeled by a ray-tracing approach, solved with a Monte-Carlo scheme.
In this work the results for a complete rear lamp with halogen bulbs are reported. Moreover, the case of innovative LED-based lighting functions is also studied. |
22-23 October 2012 Pacengo del Garda 
