Analysis of Thermal Comfort and Contaminant Removal in an Office Room With Underfloor Air Distribution System

The study of human thermal comfort requires detailed information about distributions of air velocity, air temperature and relative humidity in an occupied zone. Air quality is related to the contaminant distributions and contaminant removal effectiveness in indoor environment. This paper presents an evaluation of thermal comfort and contaminant removal for an office setting with underfloor air distribution system by the use of computational fluid dynamics modeling. A typical single cubicle in a large office floor in steady state condition of airflow as well as heat and mass transfer is investigated for both cooling and heating scenarios. The model includes a typical cubicle in a large office floor with a chair, a desk with a personal computer on its top, and heat sources such as seated people, computer monitor and CPU, and lights. Air enters the occupied zone through an inlet located at the floor level supplying a vertical upward inflow. Five different locations of the inlet diffuser, three different inlet air speeds, and four different loads of heat loss through the floor slab in heating case scenario were considered. Distributions of velocity, temperature, relative humidity, and contaminant concentration in such cases were computed. The results were compared among various simulation cases and showed reasonable agreement with experimental data taken from related literature.