What we do in our Innovation Hub for Buildings

We innovate ventilation solutions to our customers for commercial buildings. Here we mention a few measurements of what we are able to do.

CFD – Computational Fluid Dynamics

Halton Innovation HUB offers computational fluid dynamics (CFD) services for simulating indoor climate conditions and optimizing them. CFD is suitable for a wide range of indoor environmental solutions and is especially useful when physical tests are difficult to set up. The ability to produce accurate simulations with Halton’s CFD models has been validated by comparing them with actual laboratory measurements. The possibility to use exact information on the construction and dimensions of Halton’s products is an important factor in generating accurate results.

The first step in a CFD is to define the geometric model of the actual project site as accurately as possible, with dimensions, furnishings, thermal loads, and technical systems whose features match the plans and actual site as closely as possible. Typical space is a single room, or a selected portion of it when considering for example a very large hall.

The basic parameters for the CFD are:

• The velocity of air (or other fluid)
• The density of air (or other fluid)
• Pressure
• Temperature

and other parameters that are commonly included or calculated from the basic parameters are:

• Thermal radiation
• Age of air/Air change effectiveness
• Migration of particles, droplets, etc.
• Humidity
• Comfort factors (Draught rate, PMV, PPD)

The software used is ANSYS CFX or ANSYS Fluent. Most simulations can be run using Halton’s own computing workstation dedicated primarily for numerical simulations. For very large cases there is an option to purchase cloud computing time from external service providers.

Very small and simple CFD cases usually take a day or a couple of days to complete, including few hours of computing time. On the other end, very large and complex cases can take some weeks, which includes dozens of hours of computing time.