Numerical Investigation of Airflow Patterns and Thermal Comfort in a Bus Cabin

摘要

Thermal comfort and good air distribution are the most important factors to create a good comfortable and healthy environment for passengers in a bus cabin. The investigation is carried out by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with ANSYS FLUENT 17.2 and the solver is FLUENT. In this article, three studies are investigated, including eight cases, each study investigated has a specific effect on the airflow pattern and thermal comfort inside the bus cabin. The first study investigates the effect of the angle of the adjustable air-conditioning (A/C) outlet of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, through a comparison between four angle cases 0°, 15°, 30°, 45°, and the second study investigates the optimum case conditions from the first study with two variable velocities. The third study investigates the effect of another design where the locations of the A/C outlets of the HVAC system of bus cabin are above every passenger's head without any adjustable angle and the effect of a rectangular-shaped instead of a circular-shaped outlet with the same outlet area and position. A comparison is carried out between all the cases and estimated the optimum design that has good thermal comfort for the passenger.