EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION OF A CFD MODEL IN A THERMAL ENVIRONMENT CHARACTERIZATION

摘要

Comfort has a great influence on work performance and productivity. Creating a comfortable environment can be achieved by various routes: a good selection of clothing and a proper design of equipment and technical facilities that can render an appropriate acclimatization of the occupational environment. There are several methods for solving problems of thermal comfort, including computer simulation of the thermal system comprising the Human Body - Clothing - Environment. With the evolution of computer technology and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) techniques one can now develop complete analysis of HVAC systems, with regard to the fields of flow velocity, temperature distribution, particularly in the vicinity of the human body. In this way a complete interaction of the human body with the surrounding air can be descried. The difficulty in modeling the human body arises from the complex geometric shape and its thermo-physiological properties, being important to include all these factors in the numerical simulation of the human body in a closed environment. In the current study a CFD model was developed to describe the fluid flow, heat transfer and mass transfer between the ventilation air and a human manikin inside a room. The computational model solves the heat, mass and momentum conservation equations in the computation domain using a finite volume discretization method and the resulting equations are solved in the ANSYS © environment and then validated with experimental data. The thermal characterization of the environment followed the Fanger index (PMV-PPD~1).