NUMERICAL MODELING OF WALL BOUND FLOW FOR THERMAL COMFORT

Thermal comfort is a very basic requirement in any room of a building and for which many options are available commercially. Heating or cooling for comfort when done on volumetric basis always leads to wastage of substantial amount of high grade energy due to the fact that the comfort condition may not be required in the entire volume. Hence instead of aiming for heating or cooling of an entire large space, attention may be focused to concentrate the effect in a particular zone. In the present investigation an attempt has been made to achieve the concentration of thermal comfort by guiding the flow with the help of a wall jet at a desired location. Numerical investigation has been performed on one side wall flows. The control volume for the analysis is taken from a real time scenario i.e. of a room of a standard size 3.04 m x 3.04 m and the flow occurs on the ceiling.. The parameters taken for the analysis are velocity and mean temperature profiles on the guiding ceiling and isotherm and velocity contour in the room. For this purpose commercial CFD code Fluent has been used with  turbulence model to predict the dynamics and structure of flow. Experiments have been conducted to validate the results from the software. The mean flow parameters and Nusselt number shows good agreement with experimental result.