September 1997 - July 2000
Principal investigators: Qingyan Chen and Leon Glicksman
Research Assistant: Jelena Srebric
Sponsor: American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers
Sketch of a diffuser
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers has sponsored two research projects to determine indoor environment quickly. One project is to predict the three-dimensional distributions of air velocity, temperature, and contaminant concentrations in the room on a personal computer (PC). With the new model, it is possible to calculate indoor airflow on a PC with a few minutes of computing time. The flow model has also been coupled with an energy simulation program. The other project develops a simplified numerical model to specify complex diffuser boundary conditions for numerical simulations of room air motion. Two methods have been identified to be simplest and most reliable and a method of test have been developed to determine additional parameters needed by the methods.