Abstract
Most vehicles have a heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) device to control the thermal condition and to make comfortable environment in the passenger compartment. The improvement of ventilation flow inside the passenger compartment is crucial for providing comfortable environment. For this, better understanding on the variation of flow characteristics of ventilation air inside the passenger compartment with respect to various ventilation modes is strongly required. Most previous studies on the ventilation flow in a car cabin were carried out using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis or scale-down water-model experiments. In this study, whole ventilation flow discharged from the air vent of a real passenger car was measured using a special PIV (particle image velocimetry) system for large-size FOV (field of view). Under real recirculation ventilation condition, the spatial distributions of stream-wise turbulence intensity and mean velocity were measured in the vortical panel-duct center plane under the panel ventilation mode. These experimental data would be useful for understanding the detailed flow structure of real ventilation flow and validating numerical predictions.