The serpentine belt drive system is used in the auto industry. To avoid thermal destruction inside the belt drive and improve the thermal fatigue life of pulley materials under a variety of operating conditions, the temperature information for each load case must be determined within only a few seconds. To this end, this paper proposes an advanced thermal model to calculate the temperature distribution of a serpentine belt drive at static state operating conditions in an efficient manner. In this model, using analytical and numerical methods, a set of equations is developed according to the thermal flows and heat exchanges occurring in the system. After calculating the thermal flows of each pulley and the belt temperature, the baseline numerical simulations are modified to output the temperature distribution for each pulley. In this manner, the time-consuming numerical calculations for each pulley are performed only once and then analytically modified to provide the temperature predictions for various designed load cases, which dramatically reduces the computational time while maintaining the accuracy. Furthermore, experiments were performed to obtain the temperature data, and the results exhibited a good agreement with the corresponding calculated results. The proposed model can thus be effectively utilized for several types of belt systems and the material development of pulleys.

This research proposes an innovative model for calculating the temperature distribution of a composite pulley inside a belt drive. The main advantage of the proposed model is a significant reduction in the costs of calculation resources and time. This model adopts two classical theories to determine the heat generation flux and subsequent thermal flow into the pulley. Then, ordinary differential equations are developed in this model according to the irregular geometric structures of a pulley to describe the thermal flow inside this component. Afterward, analytical solutions of the ordinary differential equations are derived to provide final temperature distributions of the pulleys. Moreover, measurements of thermal properties are conducted to reduce the influence of errors. To improve the reliability of the results, experimental temperature measurements were performed on a composite pulley of a designed belt drive system in an engine dynamometer system to validate this analytical model under various operating conditions. The temperature data measured at multiple locations indicate good agreement with the corresponding analytical results. Therefore, the temperature distribution provided by this model can be utilized for the development of high-thermal resistance composite. It can also be used for thermal fatigue simulations of composites under numerous load cases.