Forced, natural and mixed convection benchmark studies for indoor thermal environments

Abstract

In this study, some well-known experimental studies related to forced, natural, and mixed convections were used for validation of k-epsilon and k-omega turbulence models. For this purpose ANSYS-Fluent 16.0 is used. International Energy Agency IEA Annex20 room, a tall differentially heated rectangular cavity, and a mixed convective air flow within a square chamber with a heated bottom wall were considered for forced, natural, and mixed convection respectively. Standard, RNG and Realizable models of k-epsilon group, and Standard, SST and BSL models of k-omega group with enhanced wall treatment for near wall modeling were tested by comparing the velocity and temperature distributions with available measurement values of employed geometries. In total, the results of Standard and RNG k-epsilon models are in good agreement with experimental measurements. Although the performance of k-omega group models is well in natural convection, some results of these models do not agree well with test data in forced and mixed convection cases.