Improved Prediction of Indoor Contaminant Distribution for Entire Buildings

Abstract

This paper presents a study on improvements of multi-zone models for predicting building contaminant distribution by combining a multi-zone model with a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) model. The motivation is to avoid the long computations in the CFD model that are required for predicting concentrations in entire buildings. Two cases are investigated using the combined model and the results are compared to reliable experimental or CFD data. The comparisons show that the combined model provides better results than the multi-zone model alone in one of the cases, while in the other no major improvements were observed. Further investigation and development of the combined model is needed.