Validation study of convective airflow in an empty room

Numerical simulation of airflow inside an empty room has been carried out for a forced convection, a natural convection and a mixed convection respectively, by using a computational fluid dynamics approach of solving the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes fluid equations. Twodimensional model was studied at first; focusing on grid refinement, mesh topology effect, and turbulence model influences. It was found that results from a structured mesh are in better agreement with available experimental measurements for all three configurations. Further study using a three-dimensional model has also shown very good agreements with test data at measuring points. Furthermore, present study revealed flow unsteadiness by monitoring the time history of flow variables at measuring positions. This phenomenon has not found and discussed in previous studies.