A Numerical Investigation of Indoor Air Quality with CFD

Increasing interest in indoor air quality (IAQ) control has been found because of its serious effect on human health. To evaluate IAQ, thermal comfort in terms of temperature and velocity distributions of indoor air has to be analyzed in detail. Choice of location for installation of air-conditioner in a building will affect the performance of cooling effect and thermal comfort on the occupants, which in turn will affect the indoor air quality (IAQ) of the building. In this paper, we present a discussion on the proper location of the air-conditioner in order to obtain good thermal comfort for occupant of a typical bedroom in Macao. A set of carefully designed numerical experiments is run with the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software FLOVENT 3.2 [1]. Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations are solved with finite volume technique and turbulence effects upon the mean flow characteristics is modeled with the k - & model. Assumption of steady state environment is made and only convective and conductive heat transfer from the occupant and air-conditioner are being concerned.