An integral part of automotive designing is HVAC. Vehicles must have an efficient HVAC system. Poorly designed systems can cause suffocation and can be fatal to humans. We have modeled the HVAC in a car and the air conditioning system of a car. This includes the compressible flow of air with buoyancy driven flows and heat transfer. 

The aerodynamics of automobiles is of great importance as the design of the vehicle has pronounced effects on aerodynamics. It involves mind-bogglingly complex physics and mathematical models that can trick even experienced engineers. Drag forces have an enormous impact on the automobile’s performance, with some badly-designed aero resulting in great losses in performance terms. Minimizing drag can save you a good amount of fuel and helps maximize the speed of the vehicles. It applies to aircraft, cars, bikes, bicycles, and formula one vehicles. 

We perform simulations for such systems and provide you with solutions to the aerodynamics of your vehicle.

Combustion is a highly exothermic chemical reaction between the fuel and oxidizer.  Combustion reactions in automotive occur in a combustion chamber where fuel is injected and combined with air and ignited by the spark. The gases released after consumption at high temperature and pressure drive the engine components. 

The details to be captured in these processes are fuel injection rate and mixing and flow velocity information, to measurements of combustion species and soot concentration. The detailed reaction and chemical kinetics are available in the literature. The CFD solvers are well suited for combustion problems.

Electric vehicles are gaining enormous attention due to zero emissions. But the non-uniformity in temperature across battery cells and exothermic reactions leads to the rise in temperature and therefore comprised the performance and lifetime of the battery pack. This can also pose threat to safety due to thermal runaway reactions. Like humans, the battery works well and longer when operated at room temperature. 

Fuel cells enable the direct conversion of chemical energy into electrical energy. The reactants are constantly reacting to produce electricity and water as the by-product. Thermal and water management in these systems poses challenges to the smooth operations of fuel cells. Minimizing the pressure drop in the bipolar plate channels is yet another area of research that seems to be never-ending. The polarization curve considering all the important aspects in fuel cells to optimize the current density is also widely explored. These problems are addressed by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and we are working to capture all the physics involved in these cutting-edge research areas. Multiphase flows and reactions, electrochemical reactions, flow through porous media, conjugate heat transfer, and pressure velocity coupling have to be coupled to obtain the complete solution for the fuel cell.