Overview

These numerical modeling tools were developed by @rebeccamccabe in 2022 for the MIT IAP Class 16.810: Engineering Design and Rapid Prototyping. They include scripts to simulate the airflow, transient heat transfer, and virus transmission of a vehicle cabin, as well as scripts to perform multidisciplinary design optimization on the system and visualize the pareto front. For information on the class, see the subject listing and this MIT News Article.

Instructions

For everyone running any file:

• Highlight the folder all the files in this repository. Right click and select Add to Path.
• If you get the error '<your_function>' is not found in the current folder or on the MATLAB path, you haven't done this step correctly

For students performing thermal analysis:

• Input your V_air, mdot_frac, and A_frac into parameters.m
• Run [N_cells,m_heater] = heaters(which_heater,num_heaters)
• Run thermals_ode(CFM, N_cells, m_heater, parameters()) with your CFM

For students simulating their full system:

• Input all your parameters into parameters.m
• Create a design vector representing your system: design = [which_fan, num_fans, fans_series, which_filter, num_filters, which_heater, num_heaters] according to the chart below
• Run [flow,power,eff,time,mass,price] = simulation(design, parameters())

Design variable	0	1	2	3
which_fan	-	A20 800 rpm	A14 2000 rpm	A14 3000 rpm
num_fans	-	1 fan	2 fans	-
fan_series	no - parallel	yes - series	-	-
which_filter	-	A - 3M	B - Bosch	C - Bosch HEPA
num_filters	-	1 filter	2 filters	-
which_heater	A - 50W	B - 100W	C - 150W	D - 200W
num_heaters	-	1 heater	2 heaters	-

For students performing optimization:

• Input all your parameters into parameters.m
• Run mdo(). Expect this to take around 5 minutes to run.

For instructors generating the team results comparison figure:

• Modify lines 5-11 of plots/pareto.m according to the filenames and path of the results spreadsheets
• Modify lines 96-107 according to which versions you want to plot (1, 2, 3/4).
• Run pareto()