Buildings air-flow simulations: automatically-generated zonal models

We present an advanced formulation of zonal models for calculating indoor air temperature and flow distributions in buildings. Our modeling is based on  modularity:

• the behavior of a room is represented by the connection of SPARK calculation modules 
• the behavior of the building is obtained by the connection of its rooms calculation modules. 

The modules represent sub-zones of the rooms or interfaces between sub-zones. There are different kinds of modules depending of the phenomena to be represented: walls, thermal plumes, jets… which are gathered in a models library. We developed a modelgenerating tool called GenSPARK that automatically assembles the appropriate modules to construct a zonal model of an entire building. Then, SPARK solves the resulting set of equations and the airflow and temperature distribution in the building are obtained. In this article, we describe our formulation of zonal models and show how GenSPARK works. We also give results that are compared to experimental ones.