Applications of high-resolution schemes based on normalized variable formulation for 3D indoor airflow simulations

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used in a routine manner for the design of indoor environments. The quality of these CFD studies varies from poor to excellent, and only in year 2003 Sørensen and Nielsen recommend a detailed guideline on imposing quality control in the CFD-related works for indoor airflow simulations. One of these recommendations is to use monotone high-resolution (HR) schemes that apply flux limiters to ensure solution boundedness while preserving the high-order accuracy of the differencing schemes. In this paper, based on the γ-formulations derived from the normalized variable formulation, four recently developed HR schemes, GAMMA, CUBISTA, AVLSMART and HOAB, are applied to several indoor airflow problems such as (1) Smith-Hutton problem (dead-end channel); (2) forced convection problem (horizontal/oblique inflow) in a parallelepiped room; (3) mixing ventilation problem focusing on the prediction of local mean age of air; (4) flow in a two-room chamber with internal partition and (5) displacement ventilation in a mockup office. Based on the flow results, the aspects of accuracy and robustness of these HR schemes are addressed for appropriate selection of an 'ideal' differencing scheme to improve the quality of 3D indoor CFD calculations. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.