Development of non-isothermal wall jet integrated zonal model with enhanced accuracy using a multi-flow coefficient calibration method

Abstract

A zonal model is an intermediate model between a nodal model and a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. This type of models has been widely used to predict indoor temperature distribution and airflow patterns by compromising prediction accuracy and computational efficiency. However, the zonal model was mainly used to predict the indoor environment of rooms with natural convection or isothermal air supply in previous literature, neglecting its application in non-isothermal air supply. Since driving flow under non-isothermal air supply is more common in air-conditioned spaces, this paper proposes a jet-integrated zonal model (JIZM) to predict the indoor environment of rooms with non-isothermal wall jet supply, extending the applicability of the zonal modelling technique. Meanwhile, a multi-flow coefficient calibration method was developed to improve the performance of the JIZM using a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA). The applicability of the JIZM was evaluated under typical air supply scenarios. The results demonstrated that the JIZM with the proposed calibration method is able to using limited measurement data with calibrated model parameters to predict the air distributions with reasonable accuracy in a fast way, thus offering a better technique in predicting the vertical temperature distribution in air-conditioned rooms compared with a conventional zonal model.