Development And Validation Of Trombe Walls In Autodesk Simulation Cfdtm

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), as an architectural tool, has the potential to model the air flow and convective heat transfer that predominates the performance of passive solar building techniques to meet the comfort needs of building occupants; however, there is very little research on the implementation or validation of CFD software for this purpose. This study attempts to validate a verified CFD software program, Autodesk CFD, for the purpose of modeling both unvented and vented Trombe walls. Temperature and air velocity data from two past experimental studies were compared to model results. The results indicate that CFD may be used to simulate and visualize buoyancy driven air flow and mass wall heat transfer closely resembling actual Trombe wall performance.