The professionals who design HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) systems have an important job. They are the ones who make sure that café patrons can keep their jackets on inside without getting overheated. They ensure that confined air-conditioned spaces won’t feel stuffy. They can even prevent – or at least minimize – workplace thermostat wars. Read on to learn about a revolutionary new app that helps HVAC designers solve these problems better and faster by making state-of-the-art simulation technology more accessible than ever before.

Thermal comfort can be defined as "a state of mind that expresses satisfaction with the thermal environment." Simply put, it's comfortable with the environment: not too hot and not too cold. Poorly designed or improperly installed HVAC systems can directly affect thermal comfort in office buildings, theaters, cinemas, commercial centers, and residential buildings.

"Indoor air quality" refers to the level of pollutants in the air inside homes, schools, offices, and other buildings. Indoor air quality affects the health, comfort, and well-being of a building’s occupants. Studies have linked poor indoor air quality to sick building syndrome. When this happens, people who spend time inside the building can experience negative effects on their health or comfort, reduced productivity in a workplace or impaired learning in schools. A well-designed HVAC system with the right amount of fresh air ventilation ensures both optimal thermal comfort and indoor air quality. This includes selecting appropriate equipment and designing the air distribution system. When done right, the system will meet all the demands of heating, cooling, and ventilation for the various occupancy and weather conditions that occur throughout the year.

In a typical HVAC design process, an engineer uses Excel sheets or 1D tools to calculate heat loads, airflow volumes, and ventilation requirements.

This is only the first step in the iterative HVAC design procedure, and a complete HVAC design involves more than just calculating heat loads and amounts of conditioned air. The system’s performance depends on how effectively the conditioned air is distributed in the space, which is a significant factor in occupant comfort.

The challenge with this design method is that HVAC systems can only be evaluated for comfort once the design is implemented. If the system must be redesigned and implemented again to correct a thermal comfort or indoor air quality problem, it results in extra costs, project delays, and bad client experiences.

The best solution is to analyze the systems better at the design stage, and this is possible through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations.

CFD simulations enable visualization of airflow, temperature, humidity, and CO₂ concentration in conditioned spaces. CFD can simulate a building’s HVAC performance to identify potential problems during the design stage. This helps designers make informed decisions about design optimization without needing to physically build and install the system first.

The unfortunate reality is that few HVAC solution providers actually use CFD simulations in their design process. Lack of CFD knowledge, extensive training requirements, expensive software licenses, and the need for in-house high-performance computing equipment have kept CFD from being widely implemented.

Thus, there is a need to democratize CFD technology so HVAC designers everywhere can make use of this powerful design method.

A new generation of cloud-based CFD software is resolving these challenges, enabling access to cutting-edge CFD capabilities at a fraction of the time and cost. The simulationHub team is democratizing this future of HVAC design through its newly developed app called Autonomous HVAC CFD (AHC for short). The app leverages cloud computing to intelligently automate the running of thermal fluid dynamics simulations

“Autonomous HVAC CFD is an art driven by science,” says Sandip Jadhav, the CEO of CCTech. The AHC app uses CFD simulations to assess occupants’ thermal comfort inside building spaces. The algorithm computes thermal comfort indices including Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) and Percentage of People Dissatisfied (PPD). The only inputs the app needs are the Building Information Models (BIMs) of indoor spaces, along with information about the HVAC system, weather conditions, and occupant density. The heavy lifting of the CFD simulation process (fluid volume extraction, meshing, selecting the suitable numerical models and solver schemes, monitoring convergence, and postprocessing) is all done autonomously.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂ ) is an important factor that affects indoor air quality. Evaluations of HVAC system design should, therefore, take CO₂ levels into account to achieve the goal of good indoor air quality. The AHC app estimates the CO₂ levels that occupants will encounter and helps to design optimal ventilation strategies for any design space.

CCTech's motto is "Transforming Human Life by Democratization of Technology, "and accordingly, the primary focus of the Autonomous HVAC CFD app is on enabling the designer to evaluate the design at the design stage itself. It has the capability to execute multiple HVAC CFD simulations autonomously and in parallel. The design engineer can analyze the entire design space and evaluate occupant thermal comfort for various HVAC design configurations and thermal load scenarios quickly and easily.

Learn more about the application workflow in the blog Quick introduction to the Autonomous HVAC CFD application workflow by Aaditya Ruikar.

Through these key advantages, AHC plays a crucial role in the HVAC design process. AHC empowers designers to overcome long-held misconceptions about system design, freeing them to create innovative new solutions and rapidly evaluate designs to ensure that indoor air spaces will provide the best comfort possible.

Get FREE early access Wish to explore the Autonomous HVAC CFD application and optimize the design for thermal comfort ? Sign-up and get early access. Simulation credits worth $500 will be allocated for FREE. Explore the product and estimate thermal comfort for a space of 5000 square foot area for FREE.

Nothing demonstrates the power of a product more than its real-world examples. View case studies of how AHC is used for estimating thermal comfort.