COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS FOR INDOOR ENVIRONMENT MODELING: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

This paper gave an overview of the past and present applications of various Computational FluidDynamics (CFD) methods for indoor environment modeling. Typical applications used the CFD tocalculate airflow, air temperature, contaminant concentrations, and turbulence in enclosed environmentfor studying or designing thermal comfort and indoor air quality. With simple airflow and geometry, theCFD is capable of calculating accurately mean flow parameters but less accurately turbulenceparameters. For airflow in real indoor environment, it is very challenging to measure and calculateaccurately the mean and turbulence flow parameters, because neither of them are free from errors.Thus, a complete validation of the CFD results by the corresponding experimental data obtained on siteis extremely difficult. In the future, CFD applications for indoor environment will deal with morecomplicated dynamic problems and will require a method for faster than real time simulations of airflow.The Fast Fluid Dynamics (FFD) can dramatically enhance the computing speed. By running the FFD onGPUs, it is possible to perform faster than real time simulations of airflow in indoor environment.