PREDICTION OF THE FLOW FIELD IN VENTILATED ROOMS USING DIFFERENT TURBULENCE MODELS

Sabry, T. I.; Mahmoud, N. H.; Abdel-Hamied, A. A.; Hussien, A. A.

doi:10.21608/erjm.2010.67335

PREDICTION OF THE FLOW FIELD IN VENTILATED ROOMS USING DIFFERENT TURBULENCE MODELS

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Mechanical Power Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Minoufiya University, Shebin El-kom, Egypt

10.21608/erjm.2010.67335

Abstract

This paper utilizes four turbulence models to predict the airflow field inside ventilated rooms. These models are namely the standard k–ε, RNG based k–ε, Low-Reynolds number and extended k-ε (Chen-Kim) models. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is used to solve the basic equations of mass and momentum conservation in the primitive form together with the equations of turbulence model. A model room is used to obtain some flow characteristics such as velocity and turbulent kinetic energy distributions along the flow field. To test the ability of different turbulence models for predicting the airflow field, the numerical results from the proposed models are compared with the published experimental results. To extra validation, a suitable room with inlet and outlet openings of air is designed and fabricated to obtain the velocity distribution. Also, numerical findings are compared to the measured results of vertical velocity distribution inside ventilated rooms. Comparisons declare that the extended standard k-ε (Chen-Kim) model can be used to predict the airflow field inside closed rooms equipped with forced ventilation systems more accurately when compared to other different turbulence models.

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