Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Thermal comfort has become a problem to the occupants of many residential building without air-conditioning system in hot climates. Natural ventilation is the only positive option for those residential buildings to improve their thermal comfort. Hence, present work is focused in analyzing the indoor characteristics of air and thermal comfort prevailed inside the room with windows at their adjacent walls along with the additional vents. Additional openings include a roof vent and a vent in the windward side wall. In this study, Computational Fluid Dynamic technique is employed to study the indoor airflow behavior and the CFD simulation was validated with the network model. 3-Dimensional model was created and k-ε turbulence model was used. Indoor airflow behavior was studied under various locations of the roof vent and best location was identified. Also another additional vent in the windward side wall was provided and analyzed under various shapes like cylindrical and nozzle shape. Air velocity, temperature, low temperature zone, low velocity zone and Predicted mean vote contours are predicted for all the simulated cases. These results are very much useful to study the effectiveness of the additional vent. Finally, the best location for the roof vent and the best shape for additional vent at windward side wall were identified. Keywords: Ventilation, Thermal Comfort, Residential Building, CFD, PMV.