COMPUTER DESIGN TOOL FOR NON-UNIFORM INDOOR THERMA

Design of a thermally comfortable indoor environment requires detailed information about distribution of air velocity, air temperature, relative humidity, and mean radiant temperature and about heating /cooling load in a space. This research has developed a coupled airflow-and-energy simulation program to calculate simultaneously the distributions of indoor airflow and thermal comfort and heating/cooling load. The coupled program can take the non-uniform distributions of indoor airflow and heating/cooling load into account. The program can also provide thermal and fluid boundary conditions normally needed for room airflow calculation .This paper demonstrates the program capacity by applying the program to study the thermal environment in an atrium.