Experimental and computational investigation of indoor air quality inside several community kitchens in a large campus

The present work deals with the experimental and computational investigation of the air quality in selected kitchens in the campus of a large institute in India. Four kitchens have been carefully selected after a detailed initial survey of the cooking arrangement and exhaust systems in all of the kitchens in the campus. For the experimental part, the concentrations of CO2 and CO and temperature are recorded with the help of an indoor air quality measurement device named IAQ Calc7545. In each of the four kitchens, a 1.8 m × 1.5 m vertical area was selected, which is perpendicular to the vertical side of a burner that faces the cooks, and measurements were carried out at 72 suitable grid points within this area. For the computational part, the three-dimensional fluid flow field in the kitchen of site 1 is numerically simulated by Fluent. The volume fractions of CO2 and CO at the outlet of the burners are estimated from a separate FORTRAN code for equilibrium chemical analysis and are used as a boundary condition for the Fluent simulation. The mixture model for the multiphase flow in Fluent is used for finding the distribution of the species within the flow domain. Given the complexity of the geometry and flow field considered here, the results of CFD modelling agree well with the experiments, validating the choice of boundary conditions, grid generation and other subtleties involved. The measured and computed values are compared with the corresponding ASHRAE standard.