Designing, prototyping and performas testing of radiant heating system on a public transport vehicle

Internal combustion engine based vehicles use engine coolant, passing through heating coils as a heating system. The system requires vehicle engine to be warmed up to a certain temperature in order to be able to provide enough heating performance for the vehicle cabin and the passengers. Depending on the weather conditions, warming up the engine coolant may take considerably long time and hence fuel fired heaters, especially for the cold regions are need to be added in to diesel engine cooling circuit to warm-up coolant to a required temperature. This results with an increase on the exhaust emissions left to the atmosphere. As well as an increase on the vehicle fuel consumption. Beside that, since it is almost impossible to equally distribute heating coils in to the vehicle, it is impossible to have a balanced heating performance along the vehicle and this causes different heating comfort between different locations along the vehicle. On the other hand, electric and vehicles, which are getting more and more popular at every other year, have no internal combustion engine and hence no hot coolant available to be used on heating system. Therefore, technically it is impossible to use the available technology in electric vehicles heating system. In this study, a new heating methodology for the commercial passenger vehicles is studied which is based on "Far Infrared" heating technology. Far infrared heating is already being used for many areas in daily life like; saunas, large halls, industrial areas and some medical applications due to its positive effect to human body. In this project, far infrared heating technology has been used for vehicle cabin heating which will be fully electrical and will also be an alternative solution for the electric vehicle's heating.