Thermal Comfort Increase through Advanced Airflow Analysis

The present paper contains an overview of recent new methods for the improvement of passenger thermal comfort at Behr, which are already used for the development of new HVAC products. On the one hand, experimental methods like Particle Image Velocimetry and Particle Streak Tracking can provide data in areas of the flow field where either high frequency and small spatial structures or mean values of the flow play a dominant role. On the other hand, comparisons to appropriate numerical models for those kinds of flow conditions yield further insight into the flow structure and their impact on the performance of the vehicle HVAC system. As a result of direct measurements or post processing of numerical data, thermal comfort conditions can directly be determined by an in-house method called MARCO. At present, exact knowledge of the temporally and spatially resolved flow and the thermal conditions for a passenger becomes crucial in the development path.