Wednesday 3 April 2024

Airflow Simulation in Empty / Occupied Rooms and Environments

     One fine morning, I decided to code the Navier–Stokes equations [read if you are bored πŸ€£] . This post has the results of  flow simulation inside close environments of various aspect ratios. As is customary with all my CFD work using commercial and 🏑made CFD codes, this too is inspired by the free lectures of Dr. Lorena Barba.

The first case has an aspect ratio of 1:1 while for the second case, the aspect ratio is at 3:1. The airflow is at 0.4555 m/s for both cases. Both cases are isothermal at 293 K. There is no turbulence 🌬model [free code ] πŸ€‘.

The smallest resolved scale (~4x smallest mesh size) for 1:1 case is ~ 0.0045 m and for the 3:1 case is at 0.0112 m. Time scales (~4x time-step size) are at 0.0004 s and 0.0004 s, respectively. Fig. 1 shows results for 1:1 aspect ratio while the results for 3:1 case are shown in Fig. 2. For both cases, flow enters from top-left and exists at bottom-right of the rooms. The boundary conditions are taken from [1]. I compared the results with Fluent simulations I ran at same boundary conditions and stopped my simulations when eye-balling didn't revealed any difference πŸ˜†. What you expect? This is a blog not a journal 😝.


Fig. 1, 1:1 aspect ratio


Fig. 2, 3:1 aspect ratio

 
Fig. 3, 3:1 aspect ratio with partition


Fig. 4, Flow inside ducts


     If you want to hire me as your PhD student in the research projects related to turbo-machinery, aerodynamics, renewable energy, please reach out. Thank you very much for reading.

References

     [1] Horikiri, Kana & Yao, Yufeng. Validation Study of Convective Airflow in an Empty Room, "Recent Researches in Energy, Environment, Devices, Systems, Communications and Computers", ISBN: 978-960-474-284-4