This work focuses on the cooling of diesel engines. Facing heavy constraints such<p>as emissions control or fossil energy management, political leaders are forcing car<p>manufacturers to drastically reduce the fuel consumption of passenger vehicles. For<p>instance, in Europe, this fuel consumption has to reach 120 g CO2 km by 2012, namely 25 % reduction from today's level.<p>Such objectives can only be reached with an optimization of all engines components<p>from injection strategies to power steering. A classical energy balance of an internal<p>combustion engine shows four main losses: enthalpy losses at the exhaust, heat<p>transfer to the cylinder walls, friction losses and external devices driving. An<p>optimized cooling will improve three of them: the heat transfer losses by increasing<p>the cylinder walls temperature, the friction losses by reducing the oil viscosity and<p>the coolant pump power consumption.<p>A model is first built to simulate the engine thermal behavior from the combustion<p>itself to the temperatures of the different engine components. It is composed by two<p>models with different time scales. First, a thermodynamic model computes the in cylinder<p>pressure and temperature as well as the heat flows for each crank angle.<p>These heat flows are the main input parameters for the second model: the nodal<p>one. This last model computes all the engine components temperatures according<p>to the nodal model theory. The cylinder walls temperature is then given back to<p>the thermodynamic model to compute the heat flows.<p>The models are then validated through test bench measurements giving excellent<p>results for both Mean Effective Pressure and fluids (coolant and oil) temperatures.<p>The used engine is a 1.9l displacement turbocharged piston engine equipped with<p>an in-cylinder pressure sensor for the thermodynamic model validation and thermocouples<p>for the nodal model validation.<p>The model is then used to optimize the coolant mass flow rate as a function of<p>the engine temperature level. Simulations have been done for both stationary<p>conditions with effciency improvement up to 7% for specific points (low load, high<p>engine speed) and transient ones with a heating time improvement of about 2000s.<p>This gains are then validated on the test bench showing again good agreement. / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished