Contaminant dispersion in personal displacement ventilation

Personal displacement ventilation (PDV) is a new ventilation concept that intends to combine the positive features of displacement ventilation with those of task conditioning or personalized ventilation. PDV is expected to create a micro-environment  around the occupant to control the environment individually. In this study, a PDV with a contaminant source at different locations was modeled for contaminant dispersion in a full scale chamber. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to simulate the indoor airflow and pollutant transport, and the simulation results were validated against the experimental data. The contaminant concentration field for three different contaminant source locations was analyzed. It seems that this kind of PDV system cannot create the expected “micro-environment” to avoid the disturbance of the outside airflow. Further studies are needed to examine the conditions where PDV could perform better.