Virtual Testing Stand for evaluation of car cabin indoor environment

In the paper the authors refer to a new computational tool for the transient prediction of the car cabin environment and heat load during real operating conditions. The aim of the Virtual Testing Stand software is to support an early stage of the HVAC design process to predict demands for the heating and cooling for various operational conditions and types of car. This software was developed in Matlab as a standalone executable application including a parametric generator of car cabin geometry, a heat transfer model and a graphical user interface. The mathematical model is formed by the set of heat balance equations, which takes into account the heat accumulation, and the heat exchange between the car cabin, the outside environment, the HVAC system and the passengers. In this paper the main features of Matlab application are presented together with a selected sensitivity study of two significant parameters in a winter test case. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.