Indoor Airflow Simulation Using Lattice Boltzmann Method

Indoor air quality (IAQ) is very important to human health and comfort as increasingly people spent most of their time in indoor environment. Numerical simulation of indoor airflows has become a significant tool for investigation of the indoor air quality. Cost effective computational methods with reasonable accuracy have the advantage of being more accessible to designers compared to more precise but expensive DNS methods. Recently developed Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) has proved to be a powerful numerical technique for simulating fluid flows in various applications. In comparison with the conventional CFD methods, the advantages of LBM are: simple calculation procedure, simple and efficient implementation for parallel computation, and easy and robust handling of complex geometries. The indoor airflow is typically in turbulent flow regimes. Due to the high costs of more accurate direct numerical simulation (DNS) and large eddy simulation (LES), in this study the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) method was used for analyzing the turbulent flow conditions. The RANS governing equations, and in particular, the k-ε turbulence model was incorporated into the Lattice-Boltzmann computational method. The simulation results showed that the combined LBM-RANS provide a reasonably accurate description of the airflow behavior in the room at modest computational cost.