Numerical investigation on convective heat transfer and fluid flow in indoor space of structures using cfd

Abstract

The construction industry is one of the largest contributors to the nation s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), The growth of this sector will be high in the following decades also. International Energy Agency has predicted that the constructed floor area will be reaching 400 billion square meters by the year 2050. The energy consumption of these buildings will also add weight to our current energy demand. Since space comforting devices contributes to the highest end energy usage in residential buildings, research on passive space comforting methods that utilize the natural driving forces are the essence of this time. Fluid flow and heat transfers are the two crucial factors that regulate the internal temperature and air quality of the building. Their understanding will help in arriving at an effective, comfortable building design. newlineThis study numerically investigates air movement and heat distribution in buildings that utilize the natural buoyancy force in the heating and cooling of indoor space. Different parameters and their influence on convective heating and cooling are analyzed. The Navier-Stokes equations, which govern the fluid flow and heat transfer in space, are solved by the finite difference method. The governing equations that consist of mass, momentum and energy equations are adopted as stream function vorticity formulation. The central differencing scheme is used to discretize the convection and diffusion terms. The in-house code developed to solve the governing equations uses the Alternate Direct Implicit scheme. This scheme employs Thomas s algorithm to solve the Tri-Diagonal Matrix Algorithm. The reliability of the in-house code is ascertained by validating some of the standard benchmark problem results with the code results newline