Influence of Geometrical Air Vent Parameters on the Resulting Jet Stream for Passenger Car Cabins

Abstract

This study intends to support the development of novel air vent outlet approaches for passenger car cabins. The operation principle of the airflow deflection of the new air vent works without any visible adjustment elements to generate a higher degree of freedom regarding the interior design. In order to assess the correlation between the air vent geometry and the resulting jet stream, a parametrization of the outlet design is created. To evaluate the different jet streams, the resulting velocity fields are determined using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The examined qualitative and quantitative airflow characteristics form the basis for determining the evaluation criteria for various novel air vents. The analysis of the full parameter space with various geometrical vent configurations, for instance outlet height and nozzle surface alignment, is implemented by using a model order reduction technique. Based on a parameter space sampling with a Design of Experiments (DoE), the velocity field and the main flow characteristics for parameter combinations are predicted using Proper Orthogonal Decomposition + Interpolation (POD+I) and Kriging, respectively. With this adapted approach, various air outlet geometries are analysed, in order to find out optimized geometrical parameter values for each evaluation criteria.