The air intake system consists of several key components including the intake snorkel, air box, air filter, and tubes. Because they are located in the underhood environment exposed to the hot air coming from the heat exchangers, you must place the intake snorkel properly to avoid drawing excessively hot air. In addition, you must control the heat transfer via conduction and radiation from the neighboring hot components into the intake air to keep the RoA value under the design limit. Furthermore, you should consider other vehicle design requirements such as water/snow ingestment and noise characteristics when optimizing the air intake system.
Given the complexity of the flow and temperature fields in the vehicle underhood, it is difficult to satisfy these engineering goals by designing the air intake system entirely based on limited measurement data available through physical testing. Typically, several prototypes must be built and tested before an acceptable design can be found through trial and error. In addition, last-minute design changes add significant cost to vehicle development. Therefore, it is very desirable to have a simulation methodology to predict the RoA value so you can optimize the air intake system in the early vehicle development stages. The simulation methodology must be sophisticated enough to capture the complex physics involved in the underhood flow prediction, but computationally efficient enough to handle the relatively long physical time scale associated with a vehicle driving cycle.
