Vehicle multi-zone automatic Heating, Venting and Air Conditioning (HVAC) is the advanced form of the traditional air conditioning. The advantage of multi-zone automatic HVAC is that it allows the passengers of a vehicle to set a desired temperature for their own zone within the vehicle compartment. This desired temperature is then maintained by the HVAC system, which determines how best to control the available environment data to provide optimal comfort for the passengers.
To achieve overall thermal comfort of the occupants in a vehicle, multi-zone HVAC takes things a step further by adding heated steering wheel and heated/vented seats to the overall HVAC control strategy. The heating and cooling of the occupants by this integrated system is performed by complex control algorithms in form of embedded software programs and Private LIN network.
This paper describes the approach and tools used to develop, simulate and validate the multi-zone integrated climate control system. Included are: 1- introduction of an integrated HVAC, heated steering wheel and heated/vented seats technology, 2- Concept of using newly developed Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulation as a tool for performance validation, 3- verification and validation of the integrated control strategies and embedded software functionality