Analysis And Evaluation On Passenger Compartment Interior Comfort

Car gradually becomes an important part in daily life and work with the rapid development of economy and society, and people request more and more about cars. We hope it more powerful, more comfortable, and easier to drive. The temperature suitability and the freshness of air are important factors for thermal comfort when we drive. As the interior space of automotive passenger compartment is small and the interior environment is complex, the drive environment changes constantly, and there are many factors affecting the interior environment, so the thermal comfort’s study of car passenger compartment has become a difficult problem to solve for auto companies.Thermal comfort test and numerical simulation method are two major methods in the present study on the passenger compartment thermal comfort. Test method always takes a long time, and the information we could get from it is limited.So that we can’t get detail data of flow field in the car from test. With the rapid development of computer technology, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method is more widely used in process of automobile’s development. In this paper, thermal comfort of the car is studied by CFD, and the results provided some guidance for the design and development of air conditioning systems. The contents are as following:First, based on Professor Fanger’s widely adopted thermal comfort evaluation system, it proposes a thermal comfort evaluation system based on weighted of human thermal comfort sensitivity, and use it to evaluate thermal comfort in the car.Secondly, it established a three-dimensional model of automobile passenger compartment,add the human model, and establish the grid model, considering the solar radiation model and the thermal radiation model, calculated by using CFD software STAR-CCM+. It calculated the car interior flow field distribution in a central Chinese city when it is summer.Then, it analyzed the thermal comfort of compartment by the wind speed, solar radiation temperature, and the average age of the air. Then it used the PMV-PPD thermal comfort evaluation to evaluate the thermal comfort of the compartment. What’s more, it analyzed the effects of different air temperature about the thermal comfort in the compartment.Finally, it proposed an optimization scheme through the analyze of the car’s air conditioning system, and got a reasonable allocation of each pipeline’s air flow, then improved the thermal comfort of the passenger compartment.