Convective Heat Transfer at Room Walls: Some Investigations

As well known, predictions of heating/cooling loads and energy consumption in buildings are significantly affected by the evaluation of convection at room surfaces. In this regard suitable heat transfer coefficients are usually applied: however, sometimes the agreement among the available correlations is quite poor and additionally the presence of particular factors (cold and hot portions of wall, plumes from panels or electric appliances, etc.) give rise to specific conditions, which must be studied as separate cases. In this context “Computational Fluid Dynamics” (CFD) is a very useful tool but it is not still suitable for extensive applications. Therefore, in this paper some correlations are summarised and their results are compared with those obtained by numerical CFD experiments; in doing this, some critical points of CFD (such as the choice of turbulence model and grid spacing) are also discussed