Reduction of Numerical Diffusion in FFD Model

Abstract

Fast flow simulations are needed for some applications in building industry, such as the conceptual design of indoor environment or teaching of Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system design in classroom. Instead of pursuing high accuracy, those applications require only conceptual distributions of the flow but within a short computing time. To meet these special needs, a Fast Fluid Dynamics (FFD) method was proposed to provide fast airflow simulation with some compromise in accuracy. This study is to further improve the FFD method by reducing the numerical viscosity that is caused by a linear interpolation in its semi-Lagrangian solver. We propose a hybrid scheme of a linear and a third-order interpolation to reduce the numerical diffusion in low order scheme and the numerical dispersion in high order scheme. The FFD model with both linear and hybrid interpolations are evaluated by simulating four different indoor flows. The results show that the hybrid interpolation can significantly improve the accuracy of the FFD model with a small amount of extra computing time.