Abstract
Nowadays car manufacturers are striving to reduce the development time and the development cost of their new cars. Therefore it is essential to lower the number of tests on working prototypes and as well to be able to make the right choice at the right time.
To meet this challenge RENAULT Research Department has developped new tools to help designers to heat shield conception. The main one is a recommandation book leading the choice of heat shields in a number of usual cases.To define this book we have created two complementary tools: a test bench designed to study many configurations frequently found on vehicles and a simple simulation software that uses nodal analysis to calculate coupled heat exchanges (convection, radiation, conduction, mass transfer).