CFD Investigation on the Thermal Comfort for an Office Room

Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are important and essential for use in our daily comfort, either in homes, work, or transportation. And it is crucial to study the air movement coming from the inlet diffuser for a better design to enhance thermal comfort and energy consumption. The primary objective of the presented work is to investigate the thermal comfort within a faculty office occupied by two faculty members using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methodology. First, an independent mesh study was performed to reduce the uncertainty related to the mesh size. In addition, the presented CFD approach was validated against available experimental data from the literature. Then, the effect of inlet air temperature and velocity on air movement and temperature distribution is investigated using Ansys Fluent. To be as reasonable as possible, the persons who occupy the office, lights, windows, tables, the door, and computers are accounted for in the CFD simulation. After that, the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) was evaluated at three different locations inside the room, and the approximate total energy consumption was obtained for the presented cases. The CFD results showed that, for the presented cases, the sensation was neutral with the lowest energy consumption when the supply air velocity was 1 m/s and the temperature was 21 °C.