Recently, numerical method for studies on room air distribution has become of general interest, and the number of related reports is increasing. But, there are many problems which must be solved in order that this method has a practical meaning. The most important one is considered to be that the computational accuracy must be elucidated by comparing the calculated results with the experimental ones. There appear very few reports about this subject. It is well known that we may get accurate solutions only when the change of the dependent variables between adjacent mesh points is nearly linear by usual finite-difference numerical method which approximate the basic governing differential equations. Then the accuracy is presumably very poor in regions where the change of variable is severe as for example turbulent flow near the wall without using very fine mesh spacing. Although the room configuration on which we have calculated in our previous reports, has rather wide supply and exhaust opening in comparison with the room dimension, they must be limited further for simulating the practical room. Again, it is necessary to use very fine mesh spacing in region especially near narrow supply opening, because the change of variables is severe in this region in the same way as in near wall and the calculation often fails to converge with rather coarse mesh in this region which is experienced by authors. It is generally true that in numerical computation of flow field, the means of applying very fine mesh spacing is most effective for improving the accuracy. However, one has to point out at the same time that in the present situation, the available computing machine has limited such performance as capacity and speed of computation. Therefore, the accuracy of calculated results might still not be satisfactory, because from a practical point of view, it is difficult to compute with sufficiently fine mesh spacing and computing time which tend to be very costly. Then it is earnestly necessary at the moment to develop the technique with which one can calculate with practically sufficient accuracy under the conditions of a rather small number of mesh spacing and accordingly a rather short computing time. It is the purpose of this report to describe the improvement which answer these requirement. Improvements are made about following two points, 1) Applying Wall Function proposed by Wolfshtein (1967) for improving the computational accuracy near the wall region. 2) Devising the numerical model for regions near narrow supply opening in comparison with the room dimension for securing computational stability and reasonable accuracy. In this report, we described in detail these two points and compared the calculated results for the room with rectangular section by the improved numerical method to experimental results in respect to flow pattern, temperature distribution and so on. As a result, it becomes clear that the improvement in numerical method gives us statisfactory results, and is a very useful method. The flow is assumed to be two-dimensional, turbulent and not isothermal. We used so-called two-equation models of turbulence which had turbulence energy and viscous dissipation rate of turbulence energy as two dependent variables. This method used in this report is not only one of the many in use, and further investigation is necessary to calculate three-dimensional turbulent room air distribution, but it may indicate the possibility of practical application.
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