The Improvement of Ventilation Design in School Buildings Using CFD Simulation

Abstract

Unlike commercial buildings, many school buildings in China are designed for natural or mechanical ventilation to fulfill thermal comfort without HVAC systems. In hot weather, due to too many students having classes at same time, the thermal conditions in classrooms were so poor to affect student's learning, especially for large lecture rooms. Therefore, it is important to study the ventilation conditions of school buildings and to explore effective means to improve the ventilation design of school buildings. This study was conducted using Fluent CFD software to improve the ventilation performance in one classroom. The field study was carried to collect the actual data of boundary conditions for CFD simulation. In this study, four different ventilation systems were simulated, compared and analyzed. Based on the simulation data, it is found that double rows windows can help to improve the thermal comfort conditions most efficiently, and so do exhaust fans and ceiling fans. But ceiling fans can improve the environment of occupied zones better.