Experimental study on the improvement of thermal comfort inside a car cabin.

Abstract

The hot and humid climate throughout the year in Malaysia which is located near the equator, affects the thermal comfort level inside parked cars. In a closed car cabin environment, the accumulated trapped heat causes the temperature to increase up to 70 °C in average and this can pose threat to human and pets that are left inside. The objective of this paper is to identify an effective way to improve thermal comfort inside the sedan passenger car cabin that is parked under the hot sun. In this work, six cooling fans are used and placed at certain locations. To further investigate improvement in the thermal comfort, the experiments are also conducted with windows open, the use of cardboards and blankets to cover the windscreen and dashboard, respectively. The final result shows that the cooling fans with windows open, windscreens covered by cardboards and dashboard covered by thick blankets are able to reduce and stabilize the car cabin temperature, hence improve the thermal comfort.