Body force model for simulating airflow through dynamically oscillating louvers

Abstract

Louvers are primarily used for directional airflow delivery in air conditioning systems. To model the airflow passing through a louver, a detailed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis can be performed by resolving all the geometrical features of the louver (we call this the Geometrically Resolved [GR] model). However, in the case of physical movement of louvers dynamic meshing is required, leading to high computational effort. In this paper, we propose a simple airflow model with a body force in the louver region (we call this the Body Force [BF] model), which can replicate similar downstream flow while obviating the necessity to resolve the louver geometry. In order to achieve this, a body force term of appropriate magnitude is introduced in a particular region in the vicinity of louver. The BF term specification region was identified based on the louver dimensions and using inputs from the GR model simulations. The time-dependent physical movement of louvers was achieved by specifying a time-varying body force term. The results obtained from the BF model and the GR model were in good agreement. This suggests that a simple BF model is an useful alternative to the GR model to simulate airflow through louvers.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the support of the Students Undergraduate Research and Graduate Excellence (SURGE) program at IIT Kanpur for facilitating a summer internship opportunity to the following authors: B. Pati and T. Taneja at IIT Kanpur. The support from the computer center at IIT Kanpur is gratefully acknowledged for providing computational resources.