CFD study on the effect of Archimedes number and heating rate on the thermal stratification of a ventilated office

Abstract

This paper dealt with simulating a typical occupied office equipped with displacement ventilation using CFD method. The STAR-CCM+ commercial software was employed for performing the simulations in order to analyze the trend of the indoor air temperature profile in the office occupied space. Understanding this trend is a key parameter to ensure that the occupants are comfortable and thereby further conclusions on energy efficiency could be extracted. The simulations were carried out for incompressible, turbulent, and constant property air flow in the steady state condition. The results showed that increasing the number of occupants, while Archimedes number was constant, would increase the throw length of the incoming cold jet leading to an overall lower temperature profile for the case with five occupants.