Numerical investigation of air conditioning of a furnished office room

In this study, airflow profiles for conditioning the space of a furnished office room with a manikin have been numerically investigated. An existing experimental space has turned into a numerical model with a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, by using boundary conditions that were applied in the experimental study. By the help of the same software, the convergence of the solution has been ensured with optimum cell and sweep numbers. The results obtained have been compared with the experimental data and a good agreement was achieved. Consequently, a parametric study has been made to analyze the effectiveness of the present boundary conditions that will be used for further numerical models. By changing velocity, temperature and diffuser locations several parametric problem combinations have been produced, and resulting problems were solved to observe the effects of velocity-temperature distributions and diffuser locations on thermal comfort conditions.Between the investigated cases, for summer conditions, the optimum comfort conditions for the cooling process were obtained for Number 1 diffuser location with 20°C supply air temperature and 2m/s supply air velocity. For winter conditions, in the case of heating, optimum comfort conditions were obtained for Number 3 diffuser location with 30°C supply air temperature and 1m/s supply air velocity.