Li Y, Chen L, Delsante A, Hesford G
Year:
2000
Bibliographic info:
UK, Oxford, Elsevier, 2000, proceedings of Roomvent 2000, "Air Distribution in Rooms: Ventilation for Health and Sustainable Environment", held 9-12 July 2000, Reading, UK, Volume 2, pp 767-772

Natural ventilation systems for industrial buildings have traditionally been designed using empirical engineering models, which often require the designer to 'over-engineer' the design to achieve a 'guaranteed' level of ventilation performance. This paper describes an application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and multi-zone thermal and airflow modelling to analyse the effectiveness of natural ventilation in removing moisture from a red mud filtration building used in the alumina industry in Australia. Our modelling work was divided into three stages: estimation of heat and moisture sources; modelling flow patterns and moisture distributions in the existing system; and finally modelling of the flow patterns and fog formation risk in a proposed new system. It is concluded that the CFD and multi-zone modelling approaches can be applied for ventilation design of industrial buildings, but great efforts are needed to collect crucial data such as heat and moisture sources in a realistic building.