This work is addressed to contribute to the progress in the determination of indoor air flow in buildings. The air flow in such environments is caused by natural convection, stack and wind effects, infiltration of ambient air and mechanical ventilation. It is important to be able to predict the pressure, temperature and velocity distributions in order to maintain an adequate indoor environment and to minimize the energy demand at the same time. The problem is difficult due to the large and complex geometry involved, the changing boundary conditions, the mixture of free and forced convection and especially, because the flows are turbulent. The purpose of this work is to explore the feasibility of the use of Large Eddy Simulation (LES) models to carry out full scale simulations of airflow in buildings. A review of the previous works shows that the use of LES for this kind of problems has been restricted to idealized geometries and relatively low Re numbers. In this work, for code validation, a 3D cavity with mixed convection is simulated and the numerical results are compared with the experimental data of Blay, et al. (1992). Then, a single family house with a realistic geometry, Re number of 11834 and Rayleigh number of 2.4 x 1010 is solved using a Yoshizawa Smagorinsky LES model. The code TermoFluids has been used for the simulation and post-processing of the results.

Peer Reviewed