Air Quality Optimization in Excavator Cabinets Using CFD

Abstract

Air conditioning systems are vital to the operation of a vehicle. For this reason, earth-moving machinery manufacturers act very sensitively to provide their consumers with a comfortable journey and clean indoor air. In this study, the heating problem of an excavator operator cabinet is discussed. A climatic test chamber was used to perform the heating test. This allows detailed observation of airflow and temperature distributions within the cabinet. The cleaning of the geometric model and the creation of the flow model were carried out in the SpaceClaim program. The numerical mesh was created using ANSYS Fluent's meshing module. The results were obtained with the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program Fluent. The necessary data were collected during the acclimatization test while the excavator was running, and the obtained data was used at boundary conditions. The geometric model was optimized and CFD analysis was performed. Temperature measurements surrounding the operator were taken from the specified points in the ISO 10263-4 standard. CFD results show that it can replace expensive testing for excavator air conditioning applications.