Sensitivity to draught in turbulent air flows

摘要

Even though the ventilation system is designed to supply air flows at constant low velocity and controlled temperature, the resulting air movement in rooms is strongly characterised by random fluctuations. When an air flow is supplied from an inlet, a shear layer forms between the incoming and the standstill air in the room, and large scale vortices develops by coalescence of the vorticity shed at the inlet of the air supply. After a characteristically downstream distance, large scale vortices loose their identity because of the development of cascading eddies and transition to turbulence. The interaction of these vortical structures will rise a complicated three dimensional air movement affected by fluctuations whose frequencies could vary from fractions of Hz to several KHz. The perception and sensitivity to the cooling effect enhanced by these air movements depend on a number of factors interacting with each other: physical properties of the air flow, part and extension of the skin surface exposed to the air flow, exposure duration, global thermal condition, gender and posture of the person. Earlier studies were concerned with the percentage of dissatisfied subjects as a function of air velocity and temperature. Recently, experimental observations have shown that also the fluctuations, the turbulence intensity and the direction of air velocity have an important impact on draught discomfort. Two experimental investigations have been developed to observe the human reaction to horizontal air movements on bared skin surfaces, hands and neck. Attention was concentrated on the effects of relative turbulence intensity of air velocity and exposure duration on perception and sensitivity to the air movement. The air jet flows, adopted for the draught experiment in the neck, were also the object of an experimental study. This experiment was designed to observe the centre-line velocity of an isothermal circular air jet, as a function of the velocity properties at the outlet section.