Evaluation of Various Turbulence Models in Predicting Airflow and Turbulence in Enclosed Environments by CFD: Part 1—Summary of Prevalent Turbulence Models

TLDR

Air distribution in enclosed spaces is vital for thermal comfort and air quality, and CFD—especially turbulence modeling—has become essential for accurate prediction, though model choice remains a critical factor. This paper reviews recent CFD turbulence modeling advances and highlights promising models for indoor airflow simulation. The authors survey commonly used and newly proposed turbulence models for indoor environments and outline their evaluation using experimental data in a companion study.

Abstract

Air distribution in enclosed environments is crucial to thermal comfort and air quality. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has played an important role in evaluating and designing various air distribution. Many factors can influence the applications of CFD for studying air distribution. The most critical factors are the selection of an appropriate CFD approach and a turbulence model. Recent advances in CFD approaches and turbulence models provide great potential for improving prediction accuracy of air distribution in enclosed environments. This paper summarizes recent progress in CFD turbulence modeling and its application to some practical indoor environment studies. Also described are turbulence models that either are commonly used or have been proposed and used recently for indoor environment modeling. Finally, this study further identifies a few turbulence models that show great potential for modeling airflows in enclosed environments. A companion paper presents the evaluation of the selected models by using experimental data from the literature.