Numerical simulation of cooling process inside a minivan passenger compartment

The transient thermal and flow analysis in the passenger compartment of an automobile is very complicated as a result of coupled flow and heat transfer, complex boundary conditions, irregular geometry and non-linearity of the governing equations. For these reasons the design of the HV AC system has been largely dependent on experimental tests. Although experiments will generally provide qualitative and quantitative information in the design of a HV AC system, these experiments are often time consuming and expensive. The availability of a computational method can greatly reduce the development time and cost by minimizing the amount of testing required. For the present study A.IRFL03D a fmite-volume code to predict incompressible turbulent flows, was used, which uses an implicit time dependent solution method and solves for the energy equation. The main course of this research although was to use an existing geometric modelling tool to obtain the complex geometries involved in the modelling of such objects as in the case of a passenger compartment. PATRAN a commercial finiteelement modelling tool was used for the purpose. As part of the study an interface for the flow-solver was developed and also a complete post-processing tool was developed to obtain the plots for the velocity vector and temperature fields. The computational results obtained show very good trend in the prediction of the temperature proflles compared with the experiment.