Research on variation of the wind direction in different height levels of a ventilated room

Abstract

Researches on variation of the wind field in a ventilated room can help to understand the mechanisms of odor/gas dispersal and provide useful clues for the optimization of odor/gas source localization algorithms. In order to investigate laws of changes of wind fields in the indoor environment, a tool of computation fluid dynamics (CFD), i.e. the Reynolds-based standard k-ε turbulence computation model, is applied to numerically simulate air flows in different height levels in the ventilated room. The variations of the wind direction in different height levels are systematically analyzed by means of velocity vector figures and histograms of the velocity direction, respectively. Simulation results show that wind directions in different height levels do not change dramatically in the height below the air inlet. This indicates that traditional two-dimensional plume models can work well in three-dimensional environment below a certain height and provides an important clue to fix the anemometer on a odor source localization robot.