posted on 2017-07-12, 10:02authored byFrancesco Babich, Malcolm CookMalcolm Cook, Dennis Loveday, Rajan Rawal, Yash Shukla
Ceiling fans have been used for decades as a means of providing thermal comfort in tropical countries
such as India. However, recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the use of air conditioning
as a means to achieve comfort, and therefore in the total energy consumption and related CO2 emissions.
Ceiling fans are still viable options to limit use of air conditioners or in combination with air conditioners
without compromising on thermal comfort and still achieving energy savings. Ceiling fans generate nonuniform
velocity profiles, and therefore relatively non-uniform thermal environments, whose characteristics
may be tough to analyse with simple modelling methods. This issue can be investigated using
CFD. However, to date, there are few works on ceiling fans, CFD and thermal comfort. More accurate
models are therefore required to predict their performance. The research presented in this paper aimed
to develop and validate a three-dimensional transient implicit CFD model of a typical ceiling fan available
in India by comparing simulation results obtained using different URANS turbulence models with
measured data collected in controlled environment. The results highlight that this ceiling fan model is
able to replicate the predominant characteristics of the air flow generated by the fan such as the
meandering plume and the local fine free shear layers. The best results are achieved when the SST k-u
turbulence model is used, with 83% of the simulated values being within the error bars of the respective
measured value.
Funding
This research was financially supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) via the LondonLoughborough Centre for Doctoral Research in Energy Demand (LoLo) (grant number EP/H009612/1), and by the British Council under the Global Innovation Initiative, the latter involving an international research collaboration between UC Berkeley (USA), CEPT University (India), Loughborough University and De Montfort University (UK).
History
School
Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
Building and Environment
Volume
123
Pages
37-49
Citation
BABICH, F. ... et al., 2017. Transient three-dimensional CFD modelling of ceiling fans. Building and Environment, 123 (October 2017), pp. 37–49.
Publisher
Elsevier Ltd.
Version
VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/
Acceptance date
2017-06-21
Publication date
2017-06-23
Copyright date
2017
Notes
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).