CFD-driven optimization of air supplies deployment in an air-conditioned office

Abstract

Occupational thermal comfort is one of the key performance indicators for green and sustainable buildings. Within air-conditioned indoor spaces, the deployment of air supplies play an importance role in determining thermal comfort conditions. This becomes more critical when the non-uniformity of heat loads in space increases. The objective in this study is to develop a set of systematic solution procedure for optimizing the locations of air supplies so as to maximize the thermal comfort conditions in a typical air-conditioned office environment. High-fidelity CFD simulations, corresponding to pre-defined locations of air supplies, are performed first, followed by surrogate-based optimization (SBO) process for the pursuit of the optimal location of the air supply. The thermal comfort index, predicted mean vote (PMV), is adopted as the objective function for optimization, which is evaluated at the people's sitting height level. Results real that the most appropriate location of the air supply has been successfully obtained using the proposed optimization algorithm and procedure. Efforts in this study imply that CFD can be extended further to optimize the building designs, with the help of cost-effective optimization approaches.