Evaluation of Thermal Comfort and Cooldown Performance inside Automotive Cabin according to Air-conditioning Vent Location

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.