Abstract
Today, the need to improve the thermal comfort inside the cabin of a passenger vehicle is important not only to passenger comfort but also to their safety. To be able to make a progress in this field, we will need a good understanding of the flow behavior inside the cabin. The numerical simulation is one of the current methods used by the car manufacturers to reduce the costs and time of vehicle development.
In this paper we will evaluate the air flow fields inside a car considering only the dashboard vents opened using three-dimensional computer simulation. The numerical simulation and post-processing of results will be done using one of the most used computational fluid dynamics software, Ansys Fluent.
The results obtained from the simulation will be compared with the velocity results measured experimentally in different points of the car cabin, considering the same conditions used in the simulation. We will be able to make a correlation between the numerical simulation and the experiment.
Keywords: thermal comfort, numerical simulation, car cabin, computational fluid dynamics, Ansys Fluent