CFD simulation of the aerodynamic sealing of plane jets

Controlling air quality is of the utmost importance within today's buildings. Vertical air curtains are often used to separate two different climatic zones in order to reduce heat transfer. This research work proposes an air curtain aimed to ensure a proper separation between two zones, a clean one and a contaminated one, which is to be used together with an air extraction from the ―contaminated‖ compartment. A CFD parametric study was carried out in order to assess the optimal parameters for achieving the aerodynamic sealing of the air curtain. The software OpenFOAMwas used to carry out the simulations. This paper presents the numerical validation of the computational fluid dynamics model for contaminant control applications and the final simulation results. Furthermore, it refers to the test results obtained in the framework of previous research, which were obtained in both small scale and full size testing, and demonstrates that the simulation results are coherent with the experiments. This research work shows that, when properly implemented, the air curtains provide the adequate aerodynamic sealing to maintain the air contaminants within the ―contaminated‖ compartment. The appropriate performance can be obtained for nozzle speeds as low as 1 m/s and for a nozzle thickness of 10 mm. The best performance is obtained when the extraction flowrate of the ―contaminated‖ compartment corresponds to the total flowrate entrained by the air curtain from the ―non-contaminated‖ side.