A Zonal Model for Large Enclosures With Combined Stratification Cooling and Natural Ventilation: Part 1—Model Generation and its Procedure

This paper describes a combined system of stratificated air conditioning and natural ventilation for large enclosures, which uses stratificated air conditioning to cool the occupied part of a space and uses natural ventilation to cool the upper part to reduce heat penetration into the lower air-conditioned part. A zonal model is constructed to predict the vertical temperature profiles of large enclosures under such a combined system. This model incorporates airflow and heat transfer throughout the space into the mass and heat balance equations for each horizontally settled zone. It introduces some particular flow dynamics and thermal effects into the predictions of mean airflows and temperature distributions. Different from those pressure-based zonal models applied generally to the predictions for small building rooms, it is termed a temperature-based zonal model, which uses correlations based on temperature differences in combination with submodels for modeling of mass flow and heat transfer in the large enclosures. The present paper provides a calculation procedure for the model. Model performances are then discussed through analyzing the impacts of some influential factors on the space air temperature profiles.