range hood

Air curtain assisted range hoods are very customary in large industrial kitchens. They allow to increase the capture efficiency of the range hood while lowering the net exhaust flow rate. For applications in residential settings, there is a lack of data on the performance of air curtain assisted range hoods, as well as a lack of information on the required settings and boundary conditions to come to the successful application of air curtain assisted range hoods.

A buoyancy-capture principle is firstly revisited as the most important fluid dynamics mechanism in kitchen range hoods. A recent new derivation of the capture efficiency of a kitchen range hood, which eliminates the inconsistencies and inadequacies of existing derivations, shows that the capture efficiency equals the ratio of capture flow rate to total plume flow rate in a confined space. The result is applied here, together with the buoyancy-capture principle, to derive a simple formula for determining capture efficiency.