The time spent by vehicle occupants in traffic has grown significantly in the last decades. Improving the thermal comfort of the people inside vehicles has gained a lot of importance in the last years both from subjective and objective reasons. The airflow passing through the air diffusers will directly affect the thermal state of the users through its temperature, velocity, and turbulence. A solution to improve the cabin ambiance is to uniformize the airflow inside vehicle through a better mixing between fresh air and ambient air. The automotive industry through its vehicles produced in the last years does not seems to consider this innovative strategy. An idea to improve the air mixing by passive means is using innovative air diffusers which have the capacity to entrain more air than a regular air diffuser. The lobed shaped cross orifice was found to entertain more air than a regular nozzle and derived from this shape more geometries emerged. A good compromise for the air diffuser design in vehicle was found to be the lobed ailerons. The entrainment in the case of the airflow issued from the air diffuser with lobed ailerons it was found to be greater than in the case of the standard air diffuser with straight ailerons.
The aim of this article is to present a comprehensive review of the state of the art regarding the use of the human thermophysiological model into computational fluid dynamics and the coupling of these two techniques. This article will focus on the modelling of the car cabin thermal environment, the integration of virtual thermal manikins and the thermal comfort assessment. Though the complexity of the car cabin geometry, the inhomogeneous air temperature/velocity fields, and transient conditions a CFD-simulation is a very powerful tool providing detailed results for a given sufficient computing power. Understanding the human body’s thermal aspects and quantifying cabin’s parameters are essential for a reliable computation. Virtual thermal manikins have become an important asset in numerical simulation, providing accurate predictions of human thermal sensation. For vehicular thermal comfort assessment, this article reviews the relevant thermal comfort indices. From 70’s, several human thermophysiological models have been developed based on the human energy balance equation to achieve realistic human thermal responses. This article introduces the most common human thermophysiological models classifies them into one-node, two-node, multi-node and multi-element thermal models. Today, in automotive R&D, the coupling technique is became a powerful tool for optimizing and evaluating the passenger’s thermal comfort.
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