Review of the existing state of the art regarding the use of CFD and human thermophysiological models for the vehicular comfort assessment

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present a comprehensive review of the state of the art regarding the use of the human thermophysiological model into computational fluid dynamics and the coupling of these two techniques. This article will focus on the modelling of the car cabin thermal environment, the integration of virtual thermal manikins and the thermal comfort assessment. Though the complexity of the car cabin geometry, the inhomogeneous air temperature/velocity fields, and transient conditions a CFD-simulation is a very powerful tool providing detailed results for a given sufficient computing power. Understanding the human body’s thermal aspects and quantifying cabin’s parameters are essential for a reliable computation. Virtual thermal manikins have become an important asset in numerical simulation, providing accurate predictions of human thermal sensation. For vehicular thermal comfort assessment, this article reviews the relevant thermal comfort indices. From 70’s, several human thermophysiological models have been developed based on the human energy balance equation to achieve realistic human thermal responses. This article introduces the most common human thermophysiological models classifies them into one-node, two-node, multi-node and multi-element thermal models. Today, in automotive R&D, the coupling technique is became a powerful tool for optimizing and evaluating the passenger’s thermal comfort.