On the feasibility of affordable high-fidelity CFD simulations for indoor environment design and control

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a reliable tool for indoor environmental applications. However, accurate CFD simulations require large computational resources, whereas significant cost reduction can lead to unreliable results. The high cost prevents CFD from becoming the primary tool for indoor environmental simulations. Nonetheless, the growth in computational power and advances in numerical algorithms provide an opportunity to use accurate and yet affordable CFD. The objective of this study is to analyze the feasibility of fast, affordable, and high-fidelity CFD simulations for indoor environment design and control using ordinary office computers. We analyze two representative test cases, which imitate common indoor airflow configurations, on a wide range of different turbulence models and discretizations methods, to meet the requirements for the computational cost, run-time, and accuracy. We consider statistically steady-state simulations for indoor environment design and transient simulations for control. Among studied turbulence models, the no-model and large-eddy simulation with staggered discretizations show the best performance. We conclude that high-fidelity CFD simulations on office computers are too slow to be used as a primary tool for indoor environment design and control. Taking into account different laws of computer growth prediction, we estimate the feasibility of high-fidelity CFD on office computers for these applications for the next decades.