Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

To design a healthy indoor environment, it is important to study airborne particle distribution indoors. As an intermediate model between multizone models and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), a fast fluid dynamics (FFD) model can be used to provide temporal and spatial information of particle dispersion in real time. This study evaluated the accuracy of the FFD for predicting transportation of particles with low Stokes number in a duct and in a room with mixed convection. The evaluation was to compare the numerical results calculated by the FFD with the corresponding experimental data and the results obtained by the CFD. The comparison showed that the FFD could capture major pattern of particle dispersion, which is missed in models with well-mixed assumptions. Although the FFD was less accurate than the CFD partially due to its simplification in numeric schemes, it was 53 times faster than the CFD.