Comparison Between STAR-CCM+ And ANSYS Fluent In Simulating Airflow In Enclosed Spaces

More than 90% of the time in a person's life is spent in enclosed spaces.The office work environment of day,sleep environment at night,or long-distance travel vehicles,such as cars,ships,commercial aircraft cabins are typical enclosed spaces.The air velocity and air temperature distribution in an enclosed space affect the thermal comfort of the people staying there,and the concentration of pollutants in the enclosed space is closely related to the health of the human body.Therefore,the air environment within the enclosed space has been widely concerned.It is important to obtain and improve the air distribution in enclosed spaces.The research on airflow in enclosed space provides a reliable numerical basis for the protection of human health and comfort.At present,the main methods of studying the air distribution of the enclosed environment are the experiment and numerical simulation.The numerical simulation method has become one of the main research method of air distribution in enclosed spaces because of the advantages of lower cost and shorter time consuming,and the detailed airflow information.ANSYS Fluent and STAR-CCM+ are the two popular general CFD commercial software for numerical simulation.In general,one organization will only choose one commercial software to purchase because of the high prices.However,the performance of STAR-CCM+ and ANSYS Fluent have not been systematically compared.It is often subject to commercial CFD software selection issues.Therefore,it is necessary to analyze the differences of the common commercial CFD software,so as to provide references for these institutions in choosing software.In this paper,the effects of different wall functions on the wall heat transfer in the enclosed spaces are studied.The correction methods of the standard temperature wall function of the CFD software in the indoor convective heat transfer model were presented.In this paper,STAR-CCM+ and ANSYS Fluent were used to simulate several different typical enclosed spaces under the same meshes and boundary conditions to compare the performances as solvers.The simulation results were compared with the experimental results from the literature,in order to obtain the effect of the standard k-? model and the wall function of the different CFD software on the airflow simulation in enclosed spaces.We can obtained the following conclusions: the air velocity,air temperature and turbulent kinetic energy simulated by STAR-CCM+ and ANSYS Fluent could be well consistent with respective experimental data.Therefore,the solver performance of STAR-CCM+ and ANSYS Fluent is comparable.Compared with a variety of wall treatments,the simulation of enclosed space airflow is more recommended to use the standard wall function to predict the wall heat transfer.A new method of modifying heat flux coefficient to the standard temperature wall function in the STAR-CCM+ is proposed to obtain the accurate temperature distribution in the indoor convective heat transfer model.The different boundary conditions are used to simulate the airflow of MD82 first class cabin,to obtain the comparison of calculation results,computing time and user experience.