Application of externally-coupled BES-CFD in HAM engineering of the indoor environment

The high importance of indoor environment performance aspects such as surface condensation, mold growth, thermal comfort, etc., is widely recognized. High-resolution simulation of heat, air and moisture (HAM) transfer can be used to enhance the prediction and analysis of these aspects. For this purpose, a coupling mechanism has been developed in order to perform run-time external coupling between Building Energy simulation (BES) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This paper presents the results of indoor humidity calculation using the new coupled tool for the BESTEST case- 600. The results are compared with stand-alone BES results and the need and importance of coupled simulations is discussed.