Investigation And Improvement On Passenger Compartment Thermal Comfort

With the development of China’s economy, car gradually enters into the lives ofordinary people. People require more and more about the vehicle comfort increasingly,including concerning more about the thermal comfort of the automobile passengercompartment. As the interior space of automotive passenger compartment is small andclosed, the drivers are likely to result in a trance, feelings of irritability, attentionproblems, leading to a variety of traffic accidents, when they stay a long time in anuncomfortable vehicle occupant compartment. Passenger compartment thermalcomfort not only related to security but also related to fuel economy. Thus, thethermal comfort’s study of car passenger compartment is receiving more and moreattention from the consumer and auto companies.There are two major methods used in the research of passenger compartmentthermal comfort, which are thermal comfort test and numerical simulation. With therapid development of computer technology and taking the cost into consideration, themethod of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is more and more widely applied tothe process of automobile’s research and development. In this paper, the thermalcomfort of passenger compartment were studied by using CFD methods, and itsresults provided some guidance for air flow of passenger compartment and the design&development of air-conditioning system.The contents are as following:First, it added the human body model to three-dimensional CAD model ofautomobile passenger compartment, built a computational grid model, considering thesolar radiation and thermal radiation model, calculates by using CFD software Fluent.It calculated the occupant thermal comfort at different times under different directionsin a southern city of China when it is summer. What’s more, obtained the equivalenttemperature of16parts of the body, it provided basis for subsequent improvements.Then，on the basis of the above studies, it improved air conditioning pipingsystem; pointed out the flaws in the design and presented the improving wayaccording to the effects of centrifugal fan of the airflow on the pipeline pressure andflow field analysis, to make the pipeline flow smoother, the resistance smaller, andwind blowing better.Finally, it improved the optics property of automobile window glass and the airdistribution of the passenger compartment, to get the best optimal thermal comfortwhen eunsure the same refrigeration and air flow of the air conditioning, provided guideance for air flow design of the passenger compartment.