A Coupled Thermal Model for Refrigeration Cycle and Cabin of the First Produced Vehicle Based on the National Vehicle Platform

Nowadays, a lot of efforts have been spent to develop effective automotive air conditioning systems due to their critical role in passengers comfort. In this study, a transient numerical thermal model has been developed for the first produced vehicle based on the national vehicle platform. At first, each component of the refrigeration cycle is modeled. In the next step, thermal loads for the vehicle’s cabin are calculated along with the solar load at every location of Iran and every hour of the day. The proposed model is used for thermal analysis of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning performance of the first produced vehicle based on the national platform. Also, for thermal analysis of the heat exchangers which are used in the model, ε-NTU method has been used. The proposed model can be an effective computer-aided engineering tool for analyzing the performance of automotive the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Finally, the amount of 5.239 kW thermal load acting on the vehicle cabin is calculated. Also, results indicate that the proposed model can reduce the vehicle cabin temperature from 60 °C to 25 °C within 25 minutes.