Analysis of Vehicle Passenger Compartment HVAC Using Simulation

The need to improve the climatic comfort within passenger vehicles is critical not only to passenger comfort but also to their safety. However, to make progress in this area, a good understanding of the flow behavior within the vehicle is required.

In this paper, we use three-dimensional computer simulations to analyses the flow fields and temperature distributions of Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) system of a generic passenger car.

We examine the role of HVAC configuration and design parameters, such as air temperatures and velocities at the inlets, the size number and location of the system's inlets and outlets. In this way the model is simulated first for normal mode with 4 front outlet and then the model is optimized by adding a rear outlet, mounted on the back of the console. The models are designed and meshed in GAMBIT environment and solved in FLUENT 5.23software.