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Current systems of air diffusion inside the car cabin are leading in some conditions to passenger discomfort. To solve this problem our company has developed a new concept of air diffusion. It consists in an air distribution system composed of a wide central air diffusion area on the top of the instrument panel and two lateral outlets. To evaluate the comfort performances of the concept a methodology based on experiments, simulation and subjective evaluation has been defined and used. The comparison between the current air diffusion and the new one shows a significant impact on the driver's and passenger's comfort. The purpose of this paper is to describe the methodology developed to analyze the air diffusion impact on the comfort and the improvements obtained by the new concept.

The heat transfer through different layers of materials, natural and forced convection, radiation, and external conditions are important in evaluating the comfort in a passenger car environment. The solvers commonly utilised, do not take all these coupled criteria into account and they require a laborious meshing step (80% of CAE's activities) which is not compatible with the development cycle. An anamorphic stretch of a pre-meshed cube to the targeted geometry allows a reduction of time by a factor of 10 or more. This paper describes both the tool, its related methodology and offers a comparison with classical meshing for a large set of topologies. This work uses some experimental and theorical results from the CLIMHAB project1.