Heat Transfer and Air Flow Patterns Inside Air Conditioned Amphitheater

Abstract

The present paper is devoted to investigate the proper design of air supply system in a large Air-conditioned Amphitheatre .The paper deals with numerical investigations of the influence of ventilation and air Conditioning supply and extract openings on Air flow pattern and the temperature in a large amphitheatre. This work focuses on air flow patterns and thermal behavior in movie theatres where large number of audience that are seated. The effectiveness of an air flow system is commonly determined by the successful removal of sensible and latent loads from occupants, equipment etc in a large theater .Fresh air supply to the theatre is expected to be of adequate rate to replace warm and void air and reduce thermal load in the zone in question. This is targeted to attain desired temperature regulation for human thermal comfort conditions. A numerical study was carried out to define the optimum airside design of the HVAC systems that provides the optimum air flow and energy utilization. The present mathematical model is inherent in a packaged Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Commercially available FLUENT Code. The numerical approach solves the partial differential equations governing the transport of mass, three momentum, energy and species in a fully turbulent three dimensional domain under steady state conditions. Numerical computations were carried out with more than 600000 orthogonal three dimensional control volumes. Grid nodes were densely located in the vicinity of the heat sources and accounts for sensible and latent heat load from individual humans. The primary objective of the present work is to assess the airflow characteristics, Heat transfer and carbon dioxide concentrations in large air-conditioned configurations with large number of occupants. The paper indicated good agreement with reported experimental data in full scale geometries. The paper ends with a brief discussion and conclusions.