Implementation of Hydro-thermal Coupling Model of Windshield Defrosting System in OpenFOAM

This paper implements a hydro-thermal coupling model for windshield defrosting system. The enthalpy method with a temperature-based formulation is used for modeling the defrosting process, and Darcy term is added to the momentum equation to solve the flow field and capture the interface between phases with a single fixed grid. Dirichlet-type thermal coupling boundary condition is used to enforce continuity of temperature and heat flux at the interfaces. The k-ω SST model is adopted for turbulence modeling to achieve better prediction of impinging jet flow in the cabin. The solver is implemented under the assumption of frozen flow, performs a RANS simulation to obtain velocity field in the cabin, and then conducts a transient simulation to solve the fluid-thermal coupling based on SIMPLE algorithm. The solver is used in the simulation of windshield defrosting of a simplified car cabin model. The results show that the defrosting process agree well with Fluent results.