Transient Thermal Analysis of Vehicle Air Conditioning System by Varying Air Vent Location

With increase in fuel prices, the customers demand for fuel efficient car. The air conditioning system employed in cars draws it power from vehicle engine and reduces its mileage. Air vent location has a significant impact on thermal comfort of cabin. In the current research, the location of air vents has been changed from all four in front dashboard (Design 1) to 2 front and two rear above passenger seat (Design 2). Transient thermal analysis is performed using ANSYS CFX 18.1. With the assistance of CFD, it is demonstrated that rear cooling air vents give a superior air comfort to passenger. The turbulence model used for CFD analysis is RNG k-epsilon which gives better prediction for swirl flows generated due to complex geometry. The transient thermal analysis has shown that cabin temperature reaches to 297.25 K from 308 K for design 1 (four vents on dashboard) during 50 counter seconds time. For front-seated passengers, design 1 offers more cooling as compared to design 2 due to more air flow due to location of all four air vents on front dashboard.