Numerical Investigation of Air Movement on Laboratory Scale Psychrometric Chamber

Abstract

Higher energy demands in favorable energy prices increasing people's affordability of the cooling devices, causing most building and residential areas to wear air conditioning systems. Higher energy saving, efficiency, and eco-friendly equipment have become a challenge for manufacturers and researchers. Also, Indonesia's government rules the energy efficiency by SKEM (Minimum Standard of Energy Performance) by air conditioning equipment's labeling. In this study, the use of perforated ceiling was selected due to the excellent air distribution performance of the panels. This study analyzes the air circulation distribution (air loop) in a psychometric chamber using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), especially placing the air conditioner test unit. The numerical studies are performed with porous media models. A CFD model was used to analyze the air distribution in the psychrometric chamber. The simulation results show that the higher value of C1 resulted in a higher value of velocity. Furthermore, the pressure drop in the test chamber did not show any significant influence. In all cases, the influence of C1 value did not significantly affect the air movement in the test chamber.