Building ventilation airflows - solution multiplicity and analysis methods

Abstract

There are growing interests in studying nonlinear dynamical phenomena of airflows in buildings. Multiple solutions are found to exist for some simple buildings with the same set of input parameters. Dynamical phenomena are very important for thermal comfort, indoor air quality, energy efficiency and fire safety in buildings. A number of examples are reviewed in this paper to illustrate the situations where multiple steady solutions exist. Currently, there are no effective engineering analysis methods that can predict the solution multiplicity for building ventilation flows. Application of dynamical systems approaches into building airflows is new. Methods for our proposed dynamical systems approach include experimental methods, simple pirate methods, and integration of continuum method with the conventional multi-zone models and computational fluid dynamics.