Effect of the personalized ventilation on indoor air quality for an indoor occupant with VOCs emission from carpet

Abstract

Personalized ventilation (PV) is aimed to improve the quality of inhaled air by delivering clean, humidified and temperature-controlled air directly to occupants’ breathing zone. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of PV devices on the concentrations of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from carpet and the temperature around an occupant in an office. Numerical simulations were conducted using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) commercial software FLUENT 6.3 for solving the continuity, momentum, energy, turbulence and concentration equations, and the simulation results were validated against the existing experimental data [1]. Personal exposure effectiveness (PEE) and manikin-based equivalent temperature change (ΔTeq) were used as indices to evaluate the performance of the PV. The results showed that the existence of the PV device greatly influenced the temperature and VOCs distributions around the occupant, but had little effect on those in the other parts of the office. Two evaluation indices increased with an increase of air flow rate. However, PV’s airflow rate had larger influence on Manikin-based equivalent temperature change than that on personalized exposure effectiveness. The ventilation strategies had a great influence on the two evaluation indices, and both of them decreased with an increase of ventilation rate. The findings of this research could contribute to the reduction of energy consumption and the improvement of utilization of PV devices.