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The main function of mobile air conditioning system in a vehicle is to provide the thermal comfort to the occupants sitting inside the vehicle at all environmental conditions. The function of ducts is to get the sufficient airflow from the HVAC system and distribute the airflow evenly throughout the cabin. In this paper, the focus is to optimize the rear passenger floor duct system to meet the target requirements through design for six sigma (DFSS) methodology. Computational fluid dynamics analysis (CFD) has been used extensively to optimize system performance and shorten the product development time. In this methodology, a parametric modeling of floor duct design using the factors such as crossectional area, duct length, insulation type, insulation thickness and thickness of duct were created using CATIA. L12 orthogonal design array matrix has been created and the 3D CFD analysis has been carried out individually to check the velocity and temperature.

The thermal comfort for the passenger inside the cabin is maintained by the HVAC system. To ensure a comfort for the 2nd row passengers in the cabin, it is very essential to design an efficient HVAC and rear console duct system which can deliver sufficient airflow with less pressure drop. The primary focus of the study is to assess existing airflow of the center console duct using CFD and propose improvement in its duct shape to meet the passenger comfort sitting in the rear seat. In this study, the vehicle cabin model, HVAC system and duct design was modeled using the design software UG. To analyze and estimate the behavior of the air flow of the system, a steady state simulation was performed using STAR CCM CFD software. The performance of the console duct system is judged by parameters like distribution of airflow, velocity at console duct outlet, pressure drop through the duct and the uniformity of the air flow at the passenger locations.