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Mecelec Design Ltd
Units 1 & 2 Brearley Court, Baird Road
Waterwells Business Park
Gloucester GL2 2AF England
Case Study Automotive
English
Automotive Systems Environmental Test Facility
This large environmental test facility was designed and built to simulate and test complete vehicle air conditioning systems as they would be configured and mounted in vehicle.
The test facility consists of 5 independent environmental zones simulating under bonnet conditions, external conditions, in vehicle conditions and front and rear HVAC conditions.
The facility has the ability to control not only temperature but humidity and air flow.
A re-circulating wind tunnel simulates the air flow onto the air conditioning heat exchanger at a given vehicle speed. It also has the ability to measure and control the mass air flow seen at the heat exchanger.
To load test the customers HVAC units the facility has a coolant supply module which can control temperature and flow of the supplied coolant.
All plant equipment is neatly packaged at the rear of the facility with easy access for main-
tenance and calibration.
The whole facility is controlled by a NI Real Time PXI data acquisition system running a bespoke NI LabView software program with a host computer interface.
Number of Environmental Zones 5
Air Temperature Range 4 @ –40°C to +65°C, 1 @ -40°C to 130°C
Humidity Range 5 — 95 % RH
Wind Tunnel Air Flow Range 250 — 8000 lt/min
Simulated Engine Drive Speed Range 0 — 6500 rpm
Coolant Temperature Range -20°C to 120°C
Coolant Flow Range 5 — 65 lt/min
Control System NI PXI
Control Software LabView
Technical Data
Number of DAQ Channels 500 Thermocouple, 128 Analogue Inputs, 32 Ana-
logue Outputs , 256 Digital I/O
Automotive Systems Environmental Test Facility
Tel : +44 (0) 1452 880 990
Fax : +44 (0) 1452 883 332
www.mecelecdesign.com
Tel : +44 (0) 1452 880 990
Fax : +44 (0) 1452 883 332
www.mecelecdesign.com
Mecelec Design Ltd
Units 1 & 2 Brearley Court, Baird Road
Waterwells Business Park
Gloucester GL2 2AF England
Case Study Automotive
English
The facility is equipped with a coolant supply module for load testing the air condition-ing system of the vehicle. Flow and temperature of the coolant are monitored and controlled by the data acqui-sition computer
The rear of the facility is where all the plant gear and instrumentation is located.
A walk through passage al-lows easy access to all com-ponents for maintenance and calibration purposes.
The plant area is fitted with sound absorbing materials to reduce any noise generated by the hardware radiating through to the external envi-ronment.
Programmable DC power supplies allow the operator to control the vehicles own sys-tems and monitor the voltage and current used. This is achieved through the LabView software
The facility is equipped with a recirculation wind tunnel which blows a controlled volume of air over the air conditioning heat exchanger. The tempera-ture, humidity and volume of air within the tunnel are all controlled.
Mounted within the tunnel air flow is a flow grid to measure the mass flow of air onto the heat ex-changer.
The facilitiy is equipped with 2 large walk in cham-bers with dedicated environmental conditions, within these chambers are 3 further areas with their own dedicated environmental conditions. Each one of the areas simulates a different possible environ-mental element that the vehicle externals and inter-nals can be exposed to.
A comprehensive bespoke LabView program controls and monitors the facility. via a PXI control system.
The software allows the operator to reconfigure the facility for any num-ber of tests. These test setups can be saved and reused at a later date
Automotive Systems Environmental Test Facility
