Measurement-based strategies for high-fidelity thermo-fluid dynamics simulation of an automotive heat exchanger

A heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) unit is an essential unit to adjust temperature for passenger’s comfortability in an automotive cabin. For efficient and reliable design and development of the HVAC unit, the interior thermal flow needs to be simulated and the performance needs to be evaluated with low cost and high fidelity. Hence, this paper develops measurement-based strategies for high-fidelity thermo-fluid dynamics simulation of an HVAC heat exchanger. These strategies tune up the parameters of a porous media model in the governing equations, which model the interaction between the heat exchanger and the surrounding thermal flow field and are conventionally fixed to certain constants, by functionalization or data assimilation with actual measurement data. The present results show that both strategies are able to reduce discrepancies between the simulation and the actual measurements, and improve fidelity to simulate the temperature field without sacrificing the simulation cost very much. Especially, the data assimilation strategy is more effective to yield more accurate simulation results only with the measurement data while the functionalization strategy needs to derive theoretical correlations. It demonstrates that data assimilation is helpful to assist reliable and efficient design and development of an HVAC unit regardless of designer’s professional skills or knowledge.