COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS OF AIR CIRCULATION IN A ROOM

Abstract

In ventilated or air-conditioned rooms optimal conditions of temperature, humidity and air velocity are required. Literature has reported that computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods have been used to investigate the velocity and temperature fields in a mechanically ventilated enclosure. Effort has been to investigate the indoor air quality of the system under study. The present work is numerical simulation of room air flow having multiple inlet and outlets using CFD code. In this study the air flow in a small size room is simulated using CFD code FLUENT 6.2.16, to predict the behaviour of the air flow a numerical scheme was used to solve the conservation equations for mass, momentum and energy with the k-e turbulence model. In this work two models of a Room are considered. Room is having one inlet, two windows and four exhausts. The dimensions of room are: length is 6 m, width is 6 and height is 4.5 m. The inlet is 2.5 m height and 1.5 m width and is located on the left wall of the room at z= 2.25 m. The windows are 2 m length and 1 m height, one is located on the front wall at a height of y=1 m and the other one is located on the back wall at the same height. Exhausts are of circular shape having 0.5 m radius. Two exhausts are on the right wall at height of 3 m at z=1 m and z= 5 m respectively. Other two exhausts are on the ceiling of the room at x=2 m, z=1.5 m and x= 2 m, z= 4.5 m respectively. In one model, wall temperature differentials are considered whereas in the other one wall temperatures are constant temperature. For both cases the vector plots of velocity and contour plots of air velocity are studied. The inlet velocity is 1 m/s. The suction pressure of exhausts is 0.3 bar. For the wall temperature differential model the temperature profiles are