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As the global environmental protection becomes the world consensus recently, the regulations of the fuel consumption and the exhaust gas have large effects on the performance and the fundamental structure of commercial vehicles. Especially the technology concerning "fluid" and "heat" has a close relationship with those issues. Owing to above circumstances, commercial vehicles such as large trucks and buses are forced to be designed near the limit of allowance. Furthermore, a rapid design is another requirement. However, though significant number of variations, i.e., cab configuration, wheel base, rear body configuration, engine specification, etc., are prepared, it is impossible to improve the performance of all those combinations by experiments which cost a lot. Accordingly, the quantitative prediction using computer will become indispensable at the beginning term of new car development.

The purpose of this paper is to present a prediction method for the refrigerator performance of an automotive air conditioner (A/C). In order to predict the refrigerator performance in arbitrary situations, we consider the thermal equilibrium of the refrigeration cycle through A/C components, as the compressor, the evaporator and the condenser. These components are affected by the thermal property of the refrigerant. Influences of circumstantial flow and temperature field in the engine compartment also are reflected upon, because the cooling performance of the condenser is sensitive to that. In this paper, we try to derive algebraic models for the major components with regard to the thermal equilibrium in the refrigeration cycle. Furthermore, we use a Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis (CFD) for the prediction of cooling airflow temperature in the engine compartment, which is another essential factor in determining the state of the refrigeration cycle.