On-site experimental validation of a coupled multizone and CFD model for building contaminant transport simulations

Previous studies indicated that the coupling of multizone and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) models can provide a good compromise between the accuracy and required computation time. The results show that the coupled model predicts contaminant distribution more accurately than multizone model alone for the zones close to the contaminant source location. For all other zones, the multizone models performed similarly or slightly better than the coupled model. The computational time of the coupled model is lower when compared to CFD alone and higher when compared to multizone alone. These observations show tradeoffs between accuracy and calculation speed. This paper presents results of on site field experiments conducted to further validate the performance of the coupled model. In a real office space, contaminant concentration, temperature, and HVAC supply airflow rate are measured to validate the coupling method with a newly proposed indirect validation method. This method is composed of an experimental validation for the CFD model, and a numerical validation of the coupled multizone and CFD model. Overall, the conducted validation shows that the coupled multi. zone and CFD model gives good results. Therefore, the developed indirect validation method can be applied to other studies to evaluate the performance of multizone or coupled multizone and CFD models.