Characterisation of natural convection in a room communicating with the outside environment through a door.

The present paper describes a numerical method for analysing threedimensional natural convection in rooms connected to the outside through large openings. The calculations made use of a Computational Fluid Dynamics (GDF) procedure which solves the three-dimensional equations for the conservation of mass, momentum and thermal energy taking into account the effects of buoyancy, heat sources, thermal radiation heat transfer and air flow turbulence. The CFO predictions agree with the experimentally observed features of the flow field, including the vertical air temperature stratification, with a reasonable degree of accuracy.