Comprehensive system-level thermal modeling of all-electric ships: Integration of SMCS and vemESRDC

In this paper, we present the integration effort of two complementary thermal simulation tools: vemESRDC and System-level design of Marine Cooling Systems (SMCS), developed at Florida State University Center for Advanced Power Systems and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sea Grant, respectively. We integrated these tools into a cohesive whole and expanded its overall capabilities, allowing the user to design a ship cooling system using the state-of-the-art methods and to study the impact of design decisions at the early design stages. The integration was numerically verified by solving a simple problem comprised of nine volume elements with internal heat generation and a cooling network. It was construed from the simulation results that SMCS-vemESRDC integration enhanced the design flexibility as well as reliability of the tool, in evaluating ship cooling network designs and promoting effective thermal management strategies.