Simulation of air flow in the IEA Annex 20 test room—validation of a simplified model for the nozzle diffuser in isothermal test cases

The modeling of air supply devices has been identified from the International Energy Agency (IEA) Annex 20 project as one of the most important problems in applying computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to predict air flow pattern and air distribution in buildings, and the complicated HESCO nozzle diffuser used in the IEA Annex 20 test room has been proved to be particularly difficult to model. In a previous study, a simplified model for this diffuser was developed and validated against experimental data. It has been shown that this model can yield good prediction for the wall jet flow issued from the diffuser, but whether this model is capable of correctly predicting the global flow pattern in the whole test room was not known. In this paper, the benchmark data of the IEA Annex 20 Test Cases B2 and B3 were used to evaluate the performance of the model for the prediction of the global air flow pattern in the test room. It was demonstrated that this model can predict the air flow pattern in the whole test room for both the Test Cases B2 and B3 with reasonable accuracy. The significance of a velocity correction when comparing the numerical prediction with experimental data obtained using omni-directional anemometers was also discussed.