Design of air curtains used for area confinement in tunnels

Abstract

Air curtains' devices, i.e., plane air jets, are used as virtual screens to reduce the heat and mass transfer from one zone to another subjected to different environmental or climatic conditions. An air curtain is a plane air jet blown through an opening. It produces a pressure drop that forbids transversal flow through the opening. The principal advantage of such installations is to facilitate the transit of people, vehicles or material through doorways of buildings and other enclosures. The purpose of this research is twofold: (i) to characterize the efficiency of air curtains; (ii) to establish how scaled down models could be used to set up full-scale installations.