Influence of plates on flow inside a recessed space generated by rejected heat

In this paper, we report investigations into temperature and flow field inside a recessed space outside a high-rise residential building in Hong Kong. The investigated 30-story recessed spaces contain 30 air-conditioners, and one or two horizontal plates. We studied the worst-case scenario in summer when all air-conditioner units reject condenser heat into this space. The predictions by using FLUENT 5.0, a computational fluid dynamics code, show that presence of one plate inside the space would cause the overall excess temperature at condenser entrance to fall up to 30%. The presence of two plates would make this figure to be around 40%.