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Air and air contaminant flows in office cubicles with and without personal ventilation: A CFD modeling and simulation study

  • Research Article
  • Indoor/Outdoor Airflow and Air Quality
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Abstract

The paper is aimed at building an appropriate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for simulating the flow field in the office cubicle with and without personalized ventilation (PV) and using it to investigate the flow field in the cubicle. A computational model was first constructed by using a commercial CFD code (STAR-CCM). In this process, different approaches to represent manikins, boundary conditions, geometries, and gridding were tested, and a proper approach was selected for simulating the air and contaminant movement in the cubicles and their interactions with the remaining room space. A comparison between the simulation and the experimental results are made to show how accurate the CFD model can be. A brief evaluation of the environmental quality was conducted for both cases with PV and underfloor air diffuser (UFAD). This comparison showed a significant advantage in the PV system, indicating how the PV system performed under different airflow rates. This verified CFD model will be utilized in the future to investigate the performance of the partitioned cubicle collaborating with personalized ventilation systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Syracuse University, 263 Link Hall, Syracuse, NY, 13244, USA

    Meng Kong, Jianshun Zhang & Jingjing Wang

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  1. Meng Kong
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  2. Jianshun Zhang
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  3. Jingjing Wang
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Correspondence to Meng Kong.

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Kong, M., Zhang, J. & Wang, J. Air and air contaminant flows in office cubicles with and without personal ventilation: A CFD modeling and simulation study. Build. Simul. 8, 381–392 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-015-0219-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-015-0219-6

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