Modeling of Flow Heat Transfer Processes and Aerodynamics in the Cabins of Vehicles

Abstract

Ensuring comfortable climatic conditions for operators in the cabin of technological machines is an important scientific and technical task affecting operator health. This article implements numerical and analytical modeling of the thermal state of the vehicle cabin, considering external airflow and internal ventilation. A method for calculating the heat transfer coefficients of a multilayer cabin wall for internal and external air under conditions of forced convective heat exchange is proposed. The cabin is located in the external aerodynamic flow to consider the speed and direction of the wind, as well as the speed of traffic. Inside the cabin, the operation of the climate system is modeled as an incoming flow of a given temperature and flow rate. The fields of velocities, pressures, and temperatures are calculated by the method of computer hydrodynamics for the averaged Navier–Stokes equations and the energy equation using the turbulence model. To verify the model, the values of the obtained heat transfer coefficients were compared with three applied theories obtained from experimental data based on dimensionless complexes for averaged velocities and calculated by a numerical method. It is shown that the use of numerical simulation considering the external air domain makes it possible to obtain more accurate results from 5% to 75% compared to applied theories, particularly in areas with large velocity gradients. This method makes it possible to get more accurate values of the heat transfer coefficients than for averaged velocities.

Keywords

• air conditioning
• climate control
• thermal comfort
• ANSYS fluent
• automotive cabin climate control system
• convection