Date of Award

Fall 2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Program/Concentration

Mechanical Engineering

Committee Director

Sushil K. Chaturvedi

Committee Member

Gregory V. Selby

Committee Member

Devendra S. Parmar

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E56 S73 2006

Abstract

Although significant advances have been made to analyze and study a room as an open thermodynamic system experiencing indoor airflow and heat exchanges with surroundings, studies incorporating entropy generation in the analysis have been sparse. This study focuses on correlating indoor thermal comfort with entropy generation, which hopefully will result in efficient utilization of energy supplied to the system. The problem that this thesis attempts to solve involves calculation of entropy production in conditioned space and its correlation to parameters that characterize thermal comfort. Thermal comfort in a conditioned space is governed by many thermal, mechanical and psychrometric parameters. The focus of the present study is two-fold. First, using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, it characterizes entropy generation as a function of various thermal, mechanical and psychrometric parameters. Subsequently, entropy generation is correlated with thermal comfort parameters such as predicted mean vote (PMV). This is achieved by simulating air flow and heat transfer in a full-scale room using a CFD code. The resulting wall heat fluxes and entropy fluxes are used to calculate entropy generation for different wall temperature, inlet air flow velocity, inlet air relative humidity and inlet air temperature. Results indicate that entropy generation is strongly affected by inlet air flow velocity, wall temperature and inlet air temperature. Thermal comfort-energy consumption charts are also presented to indicate influence of various governing parameters on energy consumption and thermal comfort.

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DOI

10.25777/0rv8-sa17

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