Effects of Tool Coupling on Transient Simulation of a Mobile Air-Conditioning Cycle

Results of numerical simulations more and more pro-vide a basis for design decisions in an automotive con-text. When simulating complex systems, one of two approaches can be chosen: The modeling in one multi-domain language like Modelica or the utilization of different specialized simulation programs. This paper demonstrates the simulation of the Heat-ing Ventilation and Air-Conditioning system (HVAC) of a car. The different components are modeled indi-vidually and validated with measurement data in sep-arate test benches. A co-simulation using one Dymola instance per component model is then created to repre-sent the whole refrigeration cycle taking into account the inter-component dependencies. To evaluate the effects introduced by the tool coupling, the results are compared to those of a single Modelica model composed of all component models