<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Nowadays, a higher amount of time is being spent inside the vehicles on account of varied reasons like traffic, longer distances being travelled and leisure rides. As a result, better comfort and convenience features are added to make the driver and passenger feel at ease. Thermal comfort and acoustic isolation are the primary parameters looked at by both the customers and the original equipment manufacturers. Seats are one of the primary touch points inside the vehicle. Perspiration caused at the contact patch areas between the seats and passengers leads to high thermal discomfort. A ventilated seat, with or without an air-conditioning system, is one such attribute offered to improve passenger thermal comfort. Ventilation becomes even more essential for front-row seats, as these are more likely to be exposed to external solar loading through the front windshield. This luxury feature of seat ventilation is now being adopted as a standard to improve the passenger's thermal comfort experience inside the vehicle.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">Standard component level evaluation of ventilated seats involve airflow and noise measurements to determine its performance. A simulation based performance prediction of these parameters would provide quick and more insightful results. Current work utilizes a transient based solver – Lattice Boltzmann Method – to correlate the performance parameters for ventilated seats. The performance parameters include seat-level airflow delivery and velocity, along with passenger ear level noise prediction. The simulation results correlates well with the test, which can be used for deployment for providing design and performance related counter-measure.</div></div>

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">HVAC system design has an accountability towards acoustic comfort of passengers of a vehicle. Owing to larger cabin volume of a bus, multiple air blowers have to be installed to ensure comfort of passengers. Such multiple blowers produce significant flow induced noise inside the cabin. For commercial success, it becomes essential to predict intensity of such a flow induced noise at very early stages in product development. Conventionally sliding mesh based CFD approach is deployed to predict flow and turbulence noise around each blower. However due to complexity, this method becomes computationally intensive resulting in cost and time inefficiency. Hence it is desirable to innovate around an alternative rapid, reliable prediction method, which ensures quick turnaround of prediction. This paper describes a unique innovative approach developed around a multiscale method where flow induced noise generated by a single blower in motion is predicted using commercial Lattice Boltzmann CFD software with a digitally scaled down HVAC system in an anechoic digital wind tunnel. These CFD predictions are used to replace all blowers with virtual stationary speakers inside digital cabin to emulate noise emanated by a large HVAC unit. Authors named this method as total Noise Multiscale Approach, in the paper. With the total multiscale approach, overall sound pressure level predicted inside the bus cabin at rear passenger ear levels are comparable with the physical test measurements and has shown fair correlation. Using this multiscale total noise method, computational cost and turnaround time has significantly reduced compared to the flow conventional resolving approach for cabin with all the blowers. This predictive total noise method found useful in designing and planning countermeasures during product development.</div></div>