Coupled model for simulation of indoor airflow and pollutant transport
- LBNL Library
Understanding airflow in buildings is essential for improving energy efficiency, controlling airborne pollutants, and maintaining occupant comfort. Recent research on whole-building airflow simulation has turned toward protecting occupants from threats of chemical or biological agents. Sample applications include helping design systems to reduce exposure, and selecting optimal sensor locations. Multizone models and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provide complementary approaches to predicting airflows in buildings. Multizone models treat a building as a collection of well-mixed zones, connected by flow paths such as doors, windows, etc. These zone-to-zone airflows carry contaminants around the building. However, the multizone formulation assumes that pollutants mix perfectly and instantaneously within each zone. For large spaces that take a long time to mix, these models cannot assess occupant exposures, or guide decisions about sensor placement or ventilation strategy. Furthermore, since the airflow in most large spaces couples tightly to the rest of the building (through doors and ventilation systems), errors due to neglecting the room details eventually propagate to the rest of the solution.
- Research Organization:
- Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- US Department of Energy; Office of Defense. Office of Defense Threat Reduction Agency (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC03-76SF00098
- OSTI ID:
- 841705
- Report Number(s):
- LBNL--56667
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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