Improvement of Natural Ventilation in a Factory Building Using a Velocity Field Measurement Technique

Abstract

Air movement in wokplaces, whether resulting from a forced ventilation system or naturally occurring airflow, has a significant impact on occupational health. In a huge shipbuilding factory building, typical harmful factors such as fume or vaporized gas from welding and cutting of steel plates, and dusts from grinding give unpleasant feeling. From field data survey, the yearly dominant, wind directions for the shipbuilding factory building tested were northwest, northeast and southeast Among the three wind directions, the ventilation improvement was the worst for the northeastern wind. This study was focused on location of the opening vents in order to utilize the natural ventilation effectively. Instantaneous velocity fields inside the 1/1000 scale-down factory building model were measured using a 2-frame PIV system. The factory building model was embedded in an atmospheric boundary layer simulated in a wind tunnel. The modified vents improve the internal Ventilation flow with increasing the flow speed more than two times, compared with that of present vents.