Computational Study of Indoor Pollutant Dispersion of an Apartment

Objectives: Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is very important for the health of human beings. Proper ventilation of apartment can improve IAQ. The objective of the study is to analyse the pollutant dispersion behaviour inside the fluid domain at fixed boundary conditions. Methods/Statistical Analysis: A 2BHK apartment has been taken for study. The fluid domain of apartment has been simulated in the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software “ANSYS Fluent 16.2”. Four inlet doors, four inlet windows, one outlet door, one outlet window and two ventilations from toilets were taken in the apartment. Seven inlet pollutant sources at the middle of the bottom of each enclosed area i.e. drawing/dining room, master bedroom, bedroom 1, kitchen, toilet 1 and toilet 2 have been considered. The methane gas is selected as the pollutant in the study. The k-epsilon (2 equations) model has been used and methane-air mixture has been taken for species transport. Findings: The methane mass fraction has been studied at different planes and at different locations of the domain. It was observed that the pollutant dispersion phenomena were varying at different locations and with this the highest methane mass fraction zone have been discussed. Application/Improvements: Simulated model can be useful in urban management and planning to find the best geometrical configurations of infrastructure, especially residential, to achieve proper and effective ventilations. Present model can also be more effective with environmental wind tunnel validations.