REAL TIME AIRFLOW SIMULATION IN BUILDINGS

Real time flow simulation is crucial in emergency management in buildings, such as fire or accidentalrelease of chemical/biological agents. Proper measures can be taken to minimize casualties withcorrect and timely prediction of the spread of the fire or contaminants. Although the traditional CFDsimulation in buildings is accurate, it is too time consuming. Multizone flow modeling is fast, but itsaccuracy is poor. Therefore, it is very necessary to develop a new method that is faster than thetraditional CFD, but more accurate than the multizone modeling.Recently, the modified semi-Lagrangian method based on Navier-Stokes equation has been used forflow simulation. This method is unconditionally stable and can use a larger time step than traditionalCFD. The method has been successfully used in computer game industry and in computer graphicscience. However, the results are only virtually real and are not rigorously validated. This investigationused the method to systematically study three basic flows in buildings and compared the numericalresults with the corresponding experimental data or direct numerical simulation data from the literature.The results conclude that it is possible to conduct flow simulations faster than real time by using themethod, although some discrepancies exist between the numerical results and the data.