Performance of Mixing Ventilation System Coupled with Dynamic Personalized Ventilator for Thermal Comfort

This study optimizes the performance of a mixing ventilation system coupled with a personalized ventilator that emits a cool sinusoidal horizontal airflow jet towards the occupant upper body in order to achieve good overall thermal comfort and good air quality in the occupant breathing zone. A transient 3-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model coupled with a transient bio-heat model was deployed to predict airflow and temperature fields in the space and around the occupant as well as segmental skin temperature profiles for local and overall thermal sensation and comfort analysis. Simulations were performed using the CFD model to determine the airflow optimal supply frequency, mean flow rate and amplitude at room temperature of 25 C and PV jet temperature of 22 C. The system also showed, that when increasing frequency at fixed mean flow rate, thermal comfort increased from by 15.2 %. However when increasing mean flow rate at a fixed frequency, thermal comfort dropped at the low frequency of 0.3 Hz but remained acceptable at the higher frequency of 0.5 Hz.