Prediction of room thermal response by CFD technique with conjugate heat transfer and radiation models

Since room air distribution is not uniform in most cases, the thermal comfort parameters measured by a sensor, which is often located outside the occupied zone, are different from those in the occupied zone. It is necessary to identify a suitable position for the sensor and to find the correlation of the comfort parameters between the sensor zone and the occupied zone. In this paper, a flow model, a conjugate heat transfer model and a radiation model are solved simultaneously in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program. For a room with natural convection, the room thermal response and indoor air distribution can be computed with only the outdoor air temperature, solar radiation, and indoor heat sources as the thermal boundary conditions. The agreement is very good between the computational results and the experimental data. With the thermal response and air distribution computed, the most suitable position for the sensor can be found and the correlation can be determined. Measures used to reduce the computing cost are also discussed.