Impact of furnishing on room airflows

In building simulation it is common to use idealized empty rooms for simulation, but furnishing elements may cause local microclimates. These microclimates can be critical for instance if furniture is placed close to a poorly insulated external walls, where the external temperatures in the winter season may lead to condensation or high relative humidity on the internal side of the building envelope. Therefore it was important to investigate the influence of furniture on the airflow patterns in the rooms and on the local airflow behind the furniture. The current paper presents an investigation of the airflow patterns behind a piece of furniture placed near a cold external wall. The investigation is based on a combination of Particle Image Velocimetry experiments and Computational Fluid Dynamics. The main topic of the investigation is to highlight the effect of increasing the distance between the wall and the furniture, and the wall and the floor. As expected the results showed that increased gap widths give increased airflow rates. However, there is an indication of a limited effect is the furniture leg height is 200 mm.