Adaptation the Use of CFD Modelling for Building Thermal Simulation

Abstract

This paper demonstrate the possibility of using CFD simulation alone to determine the internal air temperature of buildings for long periods (one year), without the assistance of any additional software, with fast computing times and an acceptable degree of accuracy for the simulation results.An experiment on CFD simulations were carried out to examine the accuracy of CFD simulation to predict building internal air temperature for a complete house in Perth, Australia. Real data recorded inside a house were compared with CFD modeling results to find the precision of the CFD simulation after CFD adaptation process applied in this research.This study is an attempt to use CFD alone to calculate the buildings internal air temperatures for extended periods (months, years). Using CFD simulations with extended periods have some problems, for example; lengthy computing times, discrepancies in peak temperature time and the internal air temperatures inside the model keep rising with time. Performing CFD analysis after applying the measures to adapt the use of CFD modeling resulted in faster computing times, with 1% of the computing time compared to that for a 1 minute time step, and with 90% of the results lying within 3°C of the real (observed) data. The overall results from CFD simulations with an average accuracy of 92% compared with the real data recorded inside the house.