Conceptual Development and Engineering Validation of a Hybrid Instrument Panel, Integrating the HVAC System

The platform strategy broadly used by OEMs across their different brands, as well as the increasing targets in terms of cost, weight and performance are driving forward since several years the modular approach for a new generation of instrument panels. An innovative hybrid concept has been developed in order to integrate the HVAC system with the structural IP components, reducing cost and weight, improving thermal comfort and structural performance, with at the meantime high style flexibility.

The integration of metallic and thermoplastic components, together with a structural use of plastic parts, has driven to the development of different modular concepts. Each of these concepts has been screened and optimized using engineering tools such as finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in order to assess the structural, noise-vibration-harshness (NVH), airflow and cool-down performance. The virtual stage mentioned before has been followed by an experimental validation on physical prototypes in order to prove the final concept.