A new evaluation indicator of air distribution in buildings

Abstract

Air distribution is the final link between a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system and the human body. Thus, the difficult technical issues of evaluating and optimizing air distribution and thermal comfort are important and worthy of further study. In this paper, a proposed target value in the form of a standard deviation is presented. The existing and new indicators were analyzed in the evaluation of the temperature field and the velocity field under different air supply modes. Different air distributions were optimized based on the target value in typical building spaces. The optimized air distributions in typical office buildings were obtained. It was found that in the five different air supply modes, the optimal values of the air supply velocity and air supply temperature exist only for the proposed evaluation indicator, i.e., the target value. That is, compared with other evaluation indicators, the target value is a more effective means of evaluating the optimization of air distribution and thermal comfort. On the basis of the optimization of the target value, the velocity in the working area is approximately 0.3 m/s for each air supply mode, and the temperature is approximately 26 °C, indicating that the target value can effectively guide the optimization process.