HVAC
Heating ventilation and air conditioning are associated with large and confined architectures and structures such as buildings, metro, trains, tunnels, caves, underground buildings, cars, vehicles, elevators, and underwater data centers. This is to control temperature, humidity, and andpurity of air in an enclosed space aiming to provide thermal comfort and acceptable indoor air quality. These flows include the physics of compressible gas flows, buoyancy-driven flows, and convective and diffusive heat transfer. In this space, Paanduv has addressed several processes with complex geometry and meshing capturing multiple physics and flow regimes.
Keywords: Diffusion, Forced convection, Heat transfer, Buoyancy driven flows, Compressible flows
Nacelle
Wind energy is a clean form of energy that is used to generate electricity by the kinetic energy created by the motion of air. The nacelle is the heart of a wind turbine that integrates several components to convert low-speed incoming rotation into high-speed rotations and electricity thereafter.
Paanduv team has put together a case study of thermal management of a nacelle overcoming all the geometric complexities. The design optimizations were performed to obtain a reduction in the overall temperature of the nacelle and in individual components; including the gearbox, generator, and fluid coupling.
Underwater Data Center
The underwater data center is a green approach to control the overall temperature rise caused by the land data center. Microsoft has tested its pods underwater and found them to be eight times more efficient than data centers on land. Others such as Google and Meta are following a similar approach.
We have identified the structural placement of the HVAC system in these data centers and modeled them. The simulations are computationally expensive and offer a great deal of structural and meshing complexity. Systems like these include modeling of heat exchangers, buoyancy effects, compressible flows, conjugate heat transfer, and pressure velocity coupling of the fluid.
HVAC in Car Seat
One should understand the heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) in confined spaces such as cars, buildings, caves, or any tunnels before designing them. Poorly designed systems can cause suffocation and can be fatal to humans. We have modeled the HVAC in a car and the air conditioning system of a car. This includes the compressible flow of air with buoyancy-driven flows and heat transfer.
The same principle applies to other designs small or large architectures.