Predicting indoor airflow by combining network, CFD, and thermal simulation

This paper describes a method which aims to generate an overall view of multizone building air flow by integrating methods for bulk air flow analysis, air flow field analysis, and building thermal analysis. This has been achieved by implementing a computational fluid dynamics approach within the ESP-r building energy simulation environment which already incorporated a nodal air flow network approach. The current state of the method is demonstrated by a case study. The main conclusion from this is that the integrated method is very promising. Other preliminary conclusions concern the difficulty of finding suitable boundary conditions and numerical values for input parameters.