Open Access

ARTICLE

Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation of Indoor Air Quality and Thermal Stratification of an Underfloor Air Distribution System (UFAD) with Various Vent Layouts

by Neil Stephen Lopez^1,*, Selena Kay Galeos¹, Brian Raphael Calderon¹, David Roy Dominguez¹, Bryan Joseph Uy¹, Rupesh Iyengar²

1 Mechanical Engineering Department, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines
2 Index Workshop LLP, Singapore

* Corresponding Author: Neil Stephen Lopez. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Fluid Mechanics and Green Material Processing)

Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing 2021, 17(2), 333-347. https://doi.org/10.32604/fdmp.2021.011213

Received 26 April 2020; Accepted 26 January 2021; Issue published 02 April 2021

Abstract

The underfloor air distribution (UFAD) system has not been able to penetrate the residential and commercial air conditioning industry significantly until now. To date, the most notable applications are found in datacenters because of their more demanding thermal stratification and cooling requirements. In addition to highlighting the advantages of the UFAD system over the traditional overhead (OH) system, this study compares various ventilation layouts for a UFAD system. Four different UFAD ventilation layouts are compared and one OH layout. The results show that using multiple swirl-type diffusers creates a more uniform floor-to-knee temperature and less air recirculation than the rectangular grille-type diffusers. Placing the return vents on the sides of the room creates a cooler environment by isolating recirculating air to a smaller space. At the end of the study, a design guide matrix is presented to summarize how the supply and return vent layout affects air conditioning performance.

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