Thermal Comfort Analysis in FDS

[TasKall]

Hi,

I am an intermediate user of FDS mostly for academic research project concerning evacuation under fire and smoke environment.

I am wondering if it is possible to run a simulation in order to evaluate the thermal comfort analysis in overcrowded area(my research involves underground spaces but i think that a similar workflow may be used for other structures).

What i mean is, in one hand how can i set up the FDS model by importing exterior environment conditions (air flow, temperature), wall heat transfer information, thermal transfer by interior lighting and human body heat transfer from metabolic rate and on the other hand how to achive (simulation time) a steady condition in order to evaluate the area compliance with regulation. I have to model also the HVAC system but this issue i have covered it.

Is FDS applicable to achieve such an analysis?

I will appreciate any instructions or guidelines.

Thank you in advance

[dr_jfloyd]

I am not aware of any published work by anyone doing this with FDS, but I believe that FDS has all  the physics needed for this:

You can define the geometry of your space

You can assign thermophysical properties for the surfaces for wall heat transfer

You can specify an initial wall temperature distribution (starting with an estimate of the steady-state wall temperature profile will reduce the time to reach steady-state)

You can define the exterior temperature conditions

You can define both surface and volumetric heat sources to represent heat dissipation from equipment and from people

You can define an HVAC system

If you were to run FDS for a long enough period of time given a steady exterior condition you would reach a steady-state.

How best to specify heat sources, what grid size is needed for this applciation, etc. are things you will need to determine as part of your research.

[TasKall]

Thank you for your reply and for the proposed recommended inputs.

So, do you believe that is a good practice to use FDS to perform a Thermal Comfort analysis or is just like to try to develop a web site with C++ instead of using HTML and CSS?

Do you have any other application suggestions to perform such an analysis?

Kind regards

[dr_jfloyd]

I don't have familiarity with the commercial tools for doing thermal comfort analysis.However, I would expect that software developed specifically for doing thermal comfort analysis would likely be HTML vs. FDS being C++.

[TasKall]

dr_jfloyd i really appreciate your advice. Thanks a lot.

Best regards