English

This paper presents an original air conditioning concept and design development elaborated for a large arena, designed to accommodate the indoor sporting events during the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. An air conditioning system, which provides a great level of flexibility and economical operation, has been developed and its performance studied in detail by the use of our computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software.

Usually, the performance of fan-coils is defined and measured in the laboratories only through thermal quantities. However, comfort conditions within a room depend also on the air flow pattern determined by the appliance. Therefore, an experimental procedure to evaluate the fluid dynamic performance of fan-coils has been developed.

In order to give some guidance for the optimization of shop entrances regarding comfort and energy savings, a project was launched by the City of Zurich. The project covers field investigations in 12 shops with different entrance types, and analytical and numerical investigations (CFD)for complementary results. The emphasis of this work was on the interaction between the situation at the entrance for different technical local solutions with other factors of importance like building ventilation, building tightness and combination with other entrances.

Working spaces in modem buildings are easily formed by interior partitions because these buildings have been designed and constructed as open spaces for flexibility. This could lead to an indoor environment which might be different from the intended design. In this study, the effect of partition on the indoor air quality in a model room has been investigated with different configurations such as the height of' partition and the gap between partition and floor.

As the thermal sensation of humans depends directly on heat transfer characteristics between the body surface and the surrounding environment, it is very important to clarify the heat transfer characteristics of a human body surface in detail. This paper describes a combined numerical (NOTE I) simulation system of airflow, thermal radiation and moisture transport based on a human thermo-physiological model used to examine the total (sensible + latent) heat transfer characteristics of a body surface. The human body is assumed to be naked (NOTE 2).

The study reported in this paper is concentrated on the estimation of the heat transfer from air to ice due to convection. Together with measurements of temperature and moisture profiles, air movements have been visualised in a small-scale model of a planned indoor ice rink. Some field tests concerning moisture content and temperature also have been realized in two different ice rinks. The study indicates that a low emissivity layer in the ceiling decreases the risk for ceiling condensation, decreases the heat radiation on the ice and decreases the driving force for air mixing.

An application of the systemic approach is presented for the study of the ventilation of a room in an industrial facility. First, a series of tracer gas experiments was made with a radioactive tracer. Analysis of the Residence Time Distribution (RTD) curves, supported by some CFD, then enabled to build a simple zonal model for the description and quantification of the observed air flow patterns. This model was able to reproduce the experimental RTDs inside the room as well as at the exhaust.