Modeling particle dispersion in personalized ventilated room

Researchers or engineers are paying more and more attention to personalized ventilation due to its unique features of providing satisfying thermal comfort and high indoor air quality. How the contaminants, especially the particles disperse in a personalized ventilation room is, therefore, deserved to be studied carefully, as contaminants’ distribution determines indoor air quality (IAQ). In this paper, dispersion of particles with aerodynamic diameter of 0.5–10 μm in a room ventilated by a personalized ventilation system is investigated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD). A three-dimensional model is employed to model particle dispersion around a human body, as well as the airflow and temperature distribution is simulated after experimental validation. The cases of personalized ventilation, and mixing ventilation under different air supply volumes are simulated. The results show that the personalized ventilation is not always the best resolution for particle removal, as different sizes of particles could have different dispersion characteristics even under the same air supply volume by different ventilation modes.