NUMERICAL STUDY OF DEFROSTING PHENOMENA OF AUTOMOTIVE WINDSHIELD GLASS

ABSTRACT The present work was undertaken to analyze numerically the defrosting phenomena of automobile windshield glass. In order to analyze the phase change from frost to water on windshield glass by discharging hot air from a defroster nozzle, the flow and the temperature field of the cabin interior, the heat transfer through the windshield glass, and the phase change of frost should be solved simultaneously. In the present work, the flow field was obtained by solving three-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations, and the temperature field was computed from the incompressible energy equation. The phase-change process was solved by the enthalpy method. For the code validation, the temperature and the phase change of the driven cavity were calculated. The calculation showed good agreement with other numerical results. Then, the present code was applied to the defrosting problem of a real automobile, and good agreement with the experimental data was also obtained.