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In the framework of noise reduction of HVAC (Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning) systems designed for cars, the present study deals with the numerical prediction of aeroacoustics phenomena encountered inside such devices for industrial purposes, i.e. with a reasonable CPU time. It is then proposed in this paper to assess the validity of the chaining, via Lighthill-Curle analogy, of a DES (Detached Eddy Simulation) resulting from the CFD code OpenFOAM (ESI Group) versus a RANS-LES (Large Eddy Simulation) and a BEM calculation resulting from the Vibro/Aeroacoustics software VA One (ESI Group) on an academic case of air passing through a rectangular diaphragm at a low Mach number. The BEM code being parallelized, the performances of DMP (Distributed Memory Processing) solution will also be assessed.

The noise radiated inside the car cabin depends on many sources such as the embedded equipments like the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) module. An HVAC is a compact and complex system composed of several elements: blower, flaps, thermal exchangers, ducts… Air provided by an HVAC is blown by a blower passing through different components and then distributed to car cabin areas. Interactions between airflow and the HVAC fixed components generate noises that emerge in the car cabin. CEVAS project, managed by the automotive equipment manufacturer Valeo, is aiming to develop a prediction tool which will provide HVAC noise spectrum and sound quality data. The tool is based, in particular, on aeroacoustic characterization of individual elements and associations of elements.

The new requirements during the first stages of the conception of a HVAC prompt the designer to integrate the acoustic problematic increasingly upstream. The designer needs to select a coherent components’ choice in order to comply with the specifications in terms of aeraulic and acoustic performances. A tool has been created to guide the designer’s choices based on an acoustic synthesis which is a design and/or diagnosis approach used to analyze and predict the acoustic behavior of a complex system. The synthesis is developed in order to propose an approach which considers the integration effects and some interaction effects. The acoustic synthesis results are the starting point of a psycho-acoustic study providing audio samples of the prediction and indications of the HVAC acceptance by the prospective user. Also, one may compare the results of different acoustic synthesis projects to study the influence of the parameters on the acoustic prediction.