Study of attached air curtain ventilation within a full-scale enclosure: comparison of four turbulence models

This paper presents a newly developed attached air curtain ventilation system. The airflow patterns produced by attached air curtain ventilation were modelled by computational fluid dynamic method. A full-scale experiment was conducted to determine the accuracy of four turbulence models: standard k–ɛ, RNG k–ɛ, SST k– ω and RSM-IP. SST k– ω model was shown to produce the most accurate results. The air distribution of attached air curtain ventilation within a full-scale enclosure could be predicted with an overall inaccuracy of 12%. All four models gave reasonably accurate prediction on air distribution for attached plane wall jet, but due to impingement in a corner, only RNG k–ɛ and SST k– ω models were shown to be reliable. The slot location could have a significant influence on simulation accuracy. When jet slot is close to sidewall, the numerical results of four models show good agreement with experimental data. The inaccuracy increases as s/b grows, but the maximum value appears in case of s/b = 5, when airflow pattern of attached air curtain ventilation model has a combination characteristic of both mixing and displacement ventilation. In future studies, we should focus more on attached air curtain ventilation to provide a combination of mixing and displacement ventilation flow, which would provide useful application to different locations with wall-mounted terminals.