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In cold climatic regions (25°C below zero) thermal comfort inside vehicle cabin plays a vital role for safety of driver and crew members. This comfortable and safe environment can be achieved either by utilizing available heat of engine coolant in conjunction with optimized in cab air circulation or by deploying more costly options such as auxiliary heaters, e.g., Fuel Fired, Positive Temperature Coefficient heaters. The typical vehicle cabin heating system effectiveness depends on optimized warm/hot air discharge through instrument panel and foot vents, air directivity to occupant's chest and foot zones and overall air flow distribution inside the vehicle cabin. On engine side it depends on engine coolant warm up and flow rate, coolant pipe routing, coolant leakage through engine thermostat and heater core construction and capacity.

With the advent of new technologies and rigorous research and development work going on vehicle engines, cars are becoming quieter and more refined than ever before. This has led to the observance of subjective noises being audible to passenger compartment which were earlier masked behind engine noise. The vehicle HVAC system has several moving parts and transient flow of refrigerant which can cause certain types of irritant noise. Thus having a refinement in of air-conditioning (AC) system would aid us in cutting down on this parasitic noise source. Thus noise refinement should be one of the important parameters during the design and development of the Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) system for a vehicle program.

This paper discusses various fruitful iterations / experiments performed to reduce air flow induced noise without compromising on total air flow requirement for thermal comfort and ways to avoid heat ingress inside the bus. Also the paper discusses the devised process for noise reduction through front loading of computer aided engineering and computational fluid dynamics analysis. Air conditioning buses in light commercial vehicle (LCV) segment is growing market in India, especially for applications like staff pick-up and drop, school applications and private fleet owners. The air-conditioning system is typically mounted on bus roof top and located laterally and longitudinally at center. It is an easiest and most feasible way to package air conditioning system to cater the large passenger space (32 to 40 seats) with the conditioned air. This makes air conditioning duct design simple and commercially viable.

This paper focuses on factors that enhance energy efficiency of air conditioning system on mid-sized, standard and premium buses with engine power from 125 to 280 HP. It covers aspects like light weighting of roof air conditioning system, usage of optimized ducting system with minimal resistance to blowers, deployment of rotary scroll compressor with fast idle control in place of reciprocating piston compressor. The scope of this paper covers AC compressors driven by main engine of vehicle/ bus, study related to auxiliary/donkey engine driven AC compressor is not considered. Context- In order to enhance fuel efficiency in buses an energy efficient air conditioning system should be deployed. This will lead to reduced parasitic load on the engine and translate into direct fuel saving.