Introduction

Airports has lot of human transit. Airports being huge, enclosed space, it requires very efficient HVAC system. It is very easy to determine the amount of cooling required, but it very difficult to active the appropriate cooling in required regions. The main challenge is due to the uneven distribution of passengers across the airport, i.e., some places like the ticketing areas will be overcrowded and some open areas may have very few passengers. According to passenger density, the HVAC system needs to be designed and efficient cooling needs to take place in the airport for better human comfort. 

Challenges

• To simulate the large volume which require very huge computational resources.
• To capture numerous details which dissipate heat.
• Extraction of proper heat load of all heat emitting sources and appropriate consideration of People heat load.
• Post-processing large amount of information and extracting relevant information for design analysis.

SOLUTION

HVAC analysis of airport is quite challenging due to the size of the CFD domain. Mesh was manually controlled to keep the mesh count within limits and at the same time capture the critical regions under consideration. Heat dissipation due to human, lights, and solar load was considered. Based on the CFD results, locations of hot and cold spots were determined. 

The flow rates from the HVAC nozzles were adjusted to improve the human comfort in the particular regions of the Airport. Human comfort parameters are referred from ASHRAE. In some of the regions, additional HVAC ducts were recommended as the heat load was much higher and the Cold air discharge was not at all sufficient to handle the heat load.

BENEFITS

• Prediction of Cold and Hot Spots.
• Adjustment of flow through nozzles & their locations. Also, the determination of addition or removal of some of the HVAC nozzles.
• Cost effective solution for Reduced number of trials with efficient HVAC design.