As a result of the improvement of technology, cabin equipments of automobiles are improved day by day. The thermal comfort in the automobile cabin has become an important factor while consumers purchasing new automobiles. In this paper, a nonlinear incompressible flow
model is adopted to simulate the flow field in the cabin. Because of the
complex geometry of an automobile cabin, unstructured grids are used in
this study, which have advantages in grid generation for complex
geometries. A cell-centered pressure-based method with a non-staggered
grid is used to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. A second-order upwind
scheme is employed for space discritization and a second-order backward
differencing method for time integration. Moreover, a parallel technique is employed to save computational time for the three-dimensional simulation.For comparison, experimental results are also provided in this paper. The flow field in the automobile cabin is successfully simulated. It is found that the present results of flow and temperature fields, obtained by using a turbulent-flow model, are more accurate than those for a laminar-flow model, compared with experimental data. These results
will be further used as the references for predicting the thermal comfort in the automobile cabin.