A Procedure for Verification, Validation, and Reporting of Indoor Environment CFD Analyses

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used to determine the airflow, heat transfer, and chemical species transport in the analysis of indoor environmental conditions as well as a wide range of other HVAC&R applications. The decision to use CFD must be firmly based on realistic expectations of its performance, cost, and effort required. Instructive materials are needed on how to verify, validate, and report indoor environmental CFD analyses. A CFD code for indoor environment modeling needs to be verified and validated based on the following aspects: basic flow and heat transfer features, turbulence models, auxiliary heat transfer and flow models, numerical methods, and assessment of predictions. All of these important aspects are described and discussed in this paper.