A New Computational Tool for Automotive Cabin Air Temperature Simulation

The thermal comfort inside automotive cabin has been extensively studied for decades. Traditional CFD models provide accurate simulation results of the air temperature distributions inside cabins but at a relatively high computation cost. In order to reduce the computational cost while still providing reasonable accuracy in simulating the air temperature profile inside a mid-sized sedan cabin, this paper introduces a new simulation tool that utilizes a proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method. The POD method, an interpolation technique, requires only one set of multiple CFD simulations to produce a set of “snapshots”. Later, any simulations that require CFD runs to solve algorithm equation sets can be simplified by using interpolation between the snapshots provided that the geometry of the cabin keeps the same. As a result, the computation time can be reduced to only a few minutes.