Architectural Atmospherics

Architectural Atmospherics is an NSF-Gateway sponsored joint project of Professor Vijay Modi and the Building Technologies Group. The project is aimed at accurately modeling air flow in buildings and heat transfer across building enclosures. We plan to use our modeling capabilities for the thermal analysis of existing buildings, for optimizing the performance of proposed passive convective heating and cooling systems, and for developing high velocity, high pressure air distribution systems for multistory commercial structures.

Our first project is a thermal-performance study of Mies Van der Rohe's Farnsworth House. We are currently using "Phoenics 2.1" software for determining flow fields, and closed form, spreadsheet based calculations for heat transfer through the building envelope.

Overview: Heat Transfer Considerations in Architecture

Summary of Work to Date

1. Preliminary Work
   • Poiseuille Flow: pressure driven flow between two plates
     Closed form solution
     Pheonics test case
     
   • Turbulent Natural Convection
2. Comparisons with closed form models
   Overview
   • Laminar flow -- Ra = 6.06E+03
   • Turbulent flow -- Ra = 6.75E+05
   • Turbulent flow -- Ra = 3.38E+06
3. The Farnsworth House
• Laminar Flow
• Turbulent flow -- Model I

Credits