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Water Wading refers to the situation where a car is moving through relatively deep water at low speed. The challenges of an automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) is to integrate the functional parts like bumper, bumper grille, engine undercover, intake system etc., to enhance the vehicle quality and performance. One of the challenges in vehicle front end and engine room design is to prevent water entry into the air intake system during wading. If significant amount of water enter the air intake, some of the water could subsequently enter the engine cylinder, which would damage the critical components within the engine beyond repair. In general practice wading tests have been carried out during proto stage of vehicle development program to ensure vehicle performance. However a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method for carrying out water wading calculations early during the development phase offers reduction in development cost and time for a new vehicle.

The outside visibility through the windshield and ORVM visibility through the side glasses are critical for safe driving. The frost deposition on the Windshield and side glasses in the cold climatic condition impairs the outside and ORVM visibility during driving and hence leads to an unsafe driving condition. In India, the regulation AIS-084 governs the defrosting standard. The defrosting performance evaluation by testing cannot be performed at concept stage when the vehicle prototype is not available. It also increases the cost of vehicle development due to increase in the number of prototype used for testing. This paper explains about the in-house developed CFD methodology to evaluate the windshield defrosting performance of the vehicle in the concept stage when no vehicle proto is available and cost of countermeasure for defrosting performance improvent is very less. This methodology is implemented for some of the existing models.