About
Professor Steven Armfield-
My work on natural convection boundary layers has made a substantial contribution to the understanding of the mechanism of flow initiation and transition. I carried out the first simulation of open stratified cavity flow, allowing the basic bifurcation mechanism to be isolated and also carried out the first investigation of weak fountain flow, leading to new scaling formulae describing the basic structure of weak fountain flow based on control parameters.
About
Dr Michael Kirkpatrick-
Michael conduscts research in the main area of environmental fluid mechanics. .
Investigation and optimisation of displacement ventilation and cooling systems
Summary
In this project an unsteady Navier-Stokes solver that will allow the accurate simulation of the displacement cooling flow will be developed and coupled to an evolutionary optimization code.
Supervisor(s)
Professor Steven Armfield, Dr Michael Kirkpatrick
Research Location
Aerospace, Mechanical & Mechatronic Engineering
Program Type
Synopsis
Displacement cooling considerably reduces the energy costs of air-conditioning rooms with low thermal loads, such as offices and auditoria, when compared to conventional mixed cooling. Crucial to the performance of displacement cooling systems is the requirement that a stratified structure is maintained in the room, while the thermal comfort of the occupants of the room requires no large local excursions in the air temperature or velocity. This requires a suitable distribution of inlet and outlet vents and appropriate control of the inflow air flow rate and temperature. In particular the thermal comfort of the occupants is determined by the turbulence levels in the room, as these have a large effect on the local heat transfer coefficients experienced by the room occupants. An automated optimization approach will be used whereby a basic optimization code is linked to geometry and mesh generation software and a flow solver.
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Keywords
mixing, natural convection, displacement air-conditioning, optimization, turbulence, Computational Fluid Dynamics, large eddy simulation, direct numerical simulation, parallel computing
Opportunity ID
The opportunity ID for this research opportunity is: 403
Other opportunities with Professor Steven Armfield
- Stability and transition of natural convection boundary layers
- Mixing in reservoir side-arms
- Purging of density stabilised saline river ponds by freshwater overflows
Other opportunities with Dr Michael Kirkpatrick