Experimental and numerical analysis of a new wind tunnel for building and mechanical ventilation components performance assessment

Abstract

Aeraulic, air movement, and wind effects studies are of high importance when assessing building performances. Indeed, several studies have been conducted using wind tunnels to better understand aerodynamics inside and around buildings. The objective of this study is to accurately characterize the air velocity field inside the test chamber of a wind tunnel at different locations using the Hot-Wire-Anemometry technique and propose an experimental protocol to extend the use of wind tunnels to study mechanical ventilation systems’ performances. To this end, a first intercomparing protocol involving six hot-wire anemometers was carried out to verify the accuracy of measurements. In addition, we have developed a CFD numerical model of the wind tunnel under the Ansys Fluent environment. Several turbulence models, numerical schemes, and mesh types were studied to analyze the air velocity distribution and identify the appropriate model fitting experimental results. As a result, the CFD model uses the Quadrilateral Structured Fine Mapped mesh, Standard k−ε as a turbulence model, and MUSCL as a discretization scheme with a relative error of 5.21% to experiment values. Both wind tunnel and its numerical model are designated to establish on-demand building and ventilation components performance assessment using a hybrid approach, numerical and experimental.