Comparing Fast Numerical Methods and Conventional CFD for Mixing Ventilation Flows

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides detailed information on the flow inside a room and can thus be used for detailed analyses of the influence of design variables, such as the placement of ventilation openings. As a result, CFD is well-suited to the optimization of ventilation at room level. However, the high computational cost and level of expertise required for implementation constitute bottlenecks in the engineering sector. In this research, a number of fast numerical techniques such as voxel-based CFD (vCFD) and coarse grid CFD (cCFD) are implemented as alternatives to conventional CFD. The methods are used to predict the velocity field for a generic mixing ventilation case and their accuracy and speed are compared. Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes simulations using RNG