Event based approach for modeling indoor airflow patterns

Abstract

People spend a significant proportion of their time indoors, where the quality of indoor air affects the productivity, efficiency, and well-being of occupants. One of the oldest challenges in building construction is designing a ventilation system that ensures optimum indoor air quality. Acceptable indoor air should provide thermal comfort and minimize human exposure to contamination. Characterizing these two elements requires information on both heat/mass transfer in the microenvironment and the time-specific activity of individuals who move among these microenvironments. While researchers have utilized simulation tools to investigate this complex human-environment interaction, current numerical techniques severely limit the simulations to overly simplified, unrealistic scenarios. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new and innovative approach called event-based modeling (EBM) to simulate airflow patterns for realistic human-environment interactions. EBM can provide an accurate approximation to simulate the patterns of air movement in indoor environments. EBM can also provide a path to simulate complex, random human-environment interactions that are pragmatically impossible to solve by current approaches. This paper formulates and evaluates this novel approach, and then validates it via simple cases of a door opening and human walking.