Emulation environment for automobile automatic climate control

Abstract

This study presents the development of a simulation platform for evaluating climate control strategies for automobiles. Unified modeling language-based use-case diagrams and statechart diagrams are employed to model the functionalities and dynamic behaviors, respectively, of a typical automatic air-conditioning system. With these two modeling diagrams as blueprints of the simulation target, a general simulation platform is implemented on Matlab/Simulink. Given a tested climate control algorithm and environment conditions, simulation results in terms of temperature and relative humidity in the car compartment can be visually presented on an implemented graphic user interface of a psychrometric chart. With its flexibility to replace control algorithms and to change testing parameters, the implemented platform has been utilized to test the control results of an enthalpy-based control algorithm, robustness of the same control algorithm at different initial conditions, and comparison of two different control algorithms.