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The air quality inside the cabin of an automobile is closely related to the health of those who spend much time in their vehicles. The automotive indoor-air quality can be improved in several ways, the most common and effective of which involves diluting the polluted air with fresh air through the vehicle's heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system. In this study, we switched between the outside-air mode and the recirculation mode of the automotive heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system to assess how the switch affected the concentration of pollution within the vehicle. The flow rates in the possible door angles between the outside-air mode and the recirculation mode of the vehicle's heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system obtained from experiments were applied to the computational fluid dynamics analysis. Furthermore, actual vehicles were infused with gas over time and concentrations were measured to validate the numerical results. In the computational fluid dynamics analysis, a user-defined function was applied to a commercial code to find the ratio of fresh air to recirculated air in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems. The obtained numerical data were analysed under a variety of conditions such as the flow rate and the ratio of fresh air to recirculated air to identify the change in the indoor-air quality source concentrations. KeywordsAutomotive indoor-air quality, computational fluid dynamics, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system, automotive climate control, recirculation mode and fresh-air mode, polynomial regression, ratio of fresh air to recirculated air Date

: As the recent advancement of automobile industry, there has been a great interest in the thermal comfort of the passengers inside the cabin of an automobile. Thermal comfort is affected by temperature, velocities, and mean radiation temperature of air, thermal resistance of clothes and physical active level of human. The present study performed computational analysis to select the location of air-conditioning vent that improves thermal comfort inside the cabin. In order to do this, we considered various air vent positions, and thermal flow analysis of each case is performed using CFD for the cabin with four passengers. The thermal comfort is evaluated using the computational results and the optimum location of air vent is suggested.

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