CFD and virtual reality in the built environment - a case study of displacement ventilation.

Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) has rapidly developed as an industrial design and evaluation tool for Building Services Engineering. Providing valuable information via mathematical predictions of fluid flow heat and mass transfer. The aim of the work is to illustrate the integration of CFD data into a truly interactive Virtual Reality (VR) environment to provide engineers with demonstrable design evaluation and visualisation facilities. To demonstrate the successful integration of CFD and VR an industrial case study of a conference room at Hoare Lea is presented. The case study comprises several CFD models of a displacement ventilation system, in conjunction with static cooling and heating under occupied and unoccupied conditions. The effectiveness of the design configurations in terms of thermal and ventilation effectiveness are evaluated and presented in a Virtual Reality model. The VR model allows the user complete interactive control of the environment and will provide an elegant means of enabling engineering solutions to be appreciated by non-engineers.