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Reduced battery discharge rates in electric vehicles (EV) tend to extend single-cycle range as well as battery lifetime. Vehicle features that tend to reduce battery discharge rate thus support viability of EV. Of special interest are features that reduce the load on the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system since that system can in turn impose a significant load on EV batteries. A companion paper quantifies the effect on steady state nominal HVAC load of glazing (i.e. window) thermal conductivity using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate heat transfer between the ambient and the air in a model car cabin when the cabin air is maintained at a comfortable temperature. For hot and cold climate, and for stationary and moving cars, reductions in HVAC load resulted from replacing a monolithic glass backlite and rooflite with polycarbonate (PC), the latter with a five-fold lower inherent thermal conductivity.

This paper is motivated by the need to predict deformation behavior of an automotive thermoplastic fender during its residence in e-coat paint bake oven where it is heated by convective currents from blowers. Part - 1 [ 1 ] of this paper, presented a FEA methodology to model the behavior of thermoplastic fender during ecoat bake. Additionally a multiphysics computational procedure to include effect of temperature and stress history was also proposed to enhance the accuracy of the solution. In this paper, we focus on the prediction of temperature history and its influence on fender deformation. Towards this, we present a two-stage thermo-mechanical simulation procedure utilizing CFD and FEA to model the ecoat bake process. While the procedure can model the heating of the fender by convective currents from blowers using CFD, the required flow field data of the ecoat oven is highly confidential.