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Air distribution in enclosed environments is crucial to thermal comfort and air quality. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has played an important role in evaluating and designing various air distribution. Many factors can influence the applications of CFD for studying air distribution. The most critical factors are the selection of an appropriate CFD approach and a turbulence model. Recent advances in CFD approaches and turbulence models provide great potential for improving prediction accuracy of air distribution in enclosed environments. This paper summarizes recent progress in CFD turbulence modeling and its application to some practical indoor environment studies. Also described are turbulence models that either are commonly used or have been proposed and used recently for indoor environment modeling. Finally, this study further identifies a few turbulence models that show great potential for modeling airflows in enclosed environments. A companion paper presents the evaluation of the selected models by using experimental data from the literature.
Zhai et al. (Thu,) studied this question.