Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) of Air Conditioning System for Human Thermal Comfort Analysis: A Simulation Study

Human thermal comfort is very important especially in an indoor environment because it may effect human’s health and welfare. Air conditioning (AC) system has become a necessary tool for indoors to maintain human comfort. This is especially applied to places with high strength of solar radiation, high relative humidity, high air temperature, and low air speed areas which are considered the most critical climate effect for indoors such as in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. However, the current mechanism of the AC system allows the user to set it into maximum cooling, i.e. at the lowest temperature with highest fan speed. This setting does not necessarily create a thermally comfortable environment inside the room, but could contribute towards negative impact to human. Thus, there is a need to study the possibility of integrating the element of thermal comfort with the AC system. This project will concentrate on a case study of the effect of AC towards human thermal comfort in an indoor environment by using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) flow simulation. It adapts an enhanced Predicted Mean Vote (PMV)-based algorithm in creating the thermal comfort environment. The simulation uses SOLIDWORKS software and concentrates on a small sized room with one person doing sedentary work. The flow simulation is done on four conditions – maximum cooling setting and other three that is based on the enhanced PMV algorithm, which were then analyzed and compared. Based on the results, it is shown that the enhanced PMV-based algorithm could provide a thermally comfortable environment compared to the maximum cooling setting.