NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF ROOM AIRFLOW USING DIFFERENT CLOSURE MODELS AND GRID GENERATION SCHEMES

摘要

Proper distribution of conditioned air plays an important role in both human thermal comfort and indoor air quality. Experimental investigations of airflow and temperature distributions for typical indoor environmental conditions are essential but expensive and time consuming. Technological advances in computer hardware and development of computational software in recent years have made numerical simulations of such flow conditions possible. The objectives of this study were to: (1) Evaluate the applicability of a commercial software in conducting numerical simulations of indoor airflow conditions for both isothermal and non-isothermal conditions using different turbulence closure models, and (2) Determine the effects of different grid generation techniques on the numerical results. The computations were performed for a large rectangular geometry room. Conditioned air entered the room through a high side-wall grille located on one side of the wall and exited through a return located on the opposite side of wall. All walls and ceiling were insulated. The floor was heated at a constant heat rate. This paper presents velocity, temperature, and turbulent kinetic energy profiles at various cross-sections. Good agreements between the numerical simulation results and experimental data were achieved.