Analysis of thermal comfort and indoor air flow characteristics for a residential building room under generalized window opening position at the adjacent walls

Abstract

Thermal comfort is an imperative factor that determines the health and productivity of the occupants living in residential buildings. The growing health related symptoms and demand for the electrical energy encourage the occupants to switch over to natural ventilation. Thermal comfort for naturally ventilated buildings mainly depends on the size and orientation of window openings. Even though most research works include the study on indoor thermal comfort for various positions of window opening it was limited to single sided and cross ventilated buildings. In real situation most of the rooms attached to the residential buildings are having window openings at their adjacent wall and hence this paper was focused to study the occupants’ thermal comfort and indoor air flow characteristics for a room with adjacent window openings under generalized approach. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique is employed to study the indoor air flow for a three-dimensional room model. The CFD simulation is checked for grid independence and having good validation with experimental measurements on the reduced scale model at wind tunnel and with the network model with the k–ε turbulence model. Air temperatures along various midlines, planes, areas occupied by low temperature zone and predicted mean vote (PMV) contours are presented in this paper. From this study a new set of strategies are identified to locate the window openings and the best location improves percentage of low temperature by 50%, reduces the PMV and PPD by 0.12% and 3.51%, respectively with reference to the worst window opening position.