An isothermal air curtain for isolation of smoking areas in restaurants was designed, built and evaluated in a test facility using oil-smoke visualisation and tracer measurements. The test facility was a ventilation test room set up as a small restaurant, with tables, chairs, person simulators (cylindrical heat sources) and balanced mechanical ventilation. Fresh air was supplied in the non-smoking section of the room, exhaust air drawn from the smoking area, and the air curtain was attached to the ceiling between the two sections.

A three dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFO) analysis has been used to predict airflow patterns in laboratory fume hoods. The simulation includes bypass fume hood primary operational features including the top and bottom bypasses, front airfoils, and rear slotted baffles. The study included the effects on the fume hood airflow of sash height changes, an operator positioned outside the fume hood, and equipment within the main fume hood chamber.

In the modem office environment there are numerous heat generating equipment. In addition there are loads from solar radiation and heat produced by people. Therefore, the loads will often exceed.the load the ventilation system can cope with. To meet this demand on extra cooling capacity the commercial market provides cooling ceiling panels and cooling beams. A literature review shows that until now the majority of the research has been focused on the cooling performance and only a minor part on the thermal comfort and air quality.

In many buildings, for instance tunnels, underground, parking areas and industrial halls, the L/H is so large that the flow pattern induced by a two dimensional supply air jet along the ceiling can be completely different from that in rooms of normal sizes. Earlier model experiments indicate that, in this case, the supply jet will have a limited penetration length (Ire) because the entrainment generates a backward flow in the lower part of the ventilated space which at a given distance will disperse or deflect the jet.

Cooling ceiling systems are controlling only the sensible heat balance of the rooms; they are always combined with a ventilation system foreseen to control indoor humidity and to cover air renewal requirements. Between the types of cooling ceiling in use, the passive chilled beams seem to be the most sensitive to ventilation air influence. Jn most of the cases, the ventilation outlets are located in the ceiling void, and consequently this generates a penalty on the beam cooling power. The work presented aims at estimating this influence, through results issued from experimental studies.

In an air-conditioned office building, the ventilation air is normally mixed with the return air from the room in the air-handling unit. Therefore, the value of the air exchange efficiency defined by age of air is usually about 1.0, which is close to the perfect mixing case. If the fresh air and air-conditioning air are supplied separately, it is possible to increase the value of the air exchange efficiency at the breathing zone if the former is supplied directly to the breathing zone. In this paper, the results of the CFD investigations for the ventilation tower system are described.

This paper proposes a new ductless air supply system with a ceiling plenum chamber using low temperature air as a secondary HY AC system for an ice thermal storage system. The proposed air supply system mixes low temperature air with return air from a room using a mixing fan unit (MFU), pressurizes a plenum chamber with the mixed air and supplies the air to the occupied room from diffusers on the ceiling.

Scale model experiments make it possible to analyse design concepts of ventilation, especially air distribution in large enclosures. The airflow structure similarity is fulfilled when experiment is carried out according to the principles of the approximate scale modelling. Special attention should also be paid to proper simulation of boundary and initial conditions. In a real ventilated object, the air is supplied with standard diffusers equipped with deflecting vanes.

The behaviour of room airflows under fully turbulent conditions is well known both in terms of experiments and numerical calculations by computational fluid dynamics (CFD). For room airflows where turbulence is not fully developed though, i.e. flows at low Reynolds numbers, the existing knowledge is limited. It has been the objective to investigate the behaviour of a plane isothermal wall jet in a full-scale ventilated room at low Reynolds numbers, i.e. when the flow is not fully turbulent. The results are significantly different from known theory for fully turbulent flows.