Computational fluid dynamics-enhanced prediction of flow rates in a multi-zone indoor environment

The dispersion prediction model called CONTAM has been widely used to predict airflow rates in multi-zone indoor environments. However, as CONTAM adopts the lumped system approach under the assumption that the air in each room is well mixed, and thus the pressure and temperature are homogeneous, its prediction may be inaccurate in certain cases. Thus, this study proposed an efficient algorithm that yielded improved flow rates by reflecting the non-uniform distribution of pressure or the presence of dynamic pressure based on single-zone computational fluid dynamics. The proposed method selectively applied a large-eddy simulation to obtain information on velocity, pressure, and temperature, which can be used for the accurate prediction of flow rates across multi-zone environment.