Ventilation engineers need to answers to a wide variety of questions like "How does an air curtain responds to a temperature change of say 10 C?", "What are the optimum positions to place the air conditioning ducts?”, etc. In modern sophisticated design cycles, the approach of using experience combined with intelligent engineering judgment is not good enough. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes combined with now available enormous and cheap processing power can be conveniently used to conduct simulations to scientifically and accurately arrive at these answers.

Human Comfort Flow and Thermal Analysis
Thermal, air-flow and relative humidity simulations provide the data for rooms and halls that can effectively quantify human comfort inside. These simulations can be used to design ventilation and ducting systems that optimize human comfort with minimum power consumption.

• Server Room Ventilation: These simulations can also be used to design ventilation systems for server rooms that help in maintaining the temperature and relative humidity at a certain specified level for proper functioning of electronic components.

Smoke Simulation
This involves simulation of propagation of smoke due to a smoke source initiated by a fire. These simulations are desirable for building engineers seeking to predict fire safety in buildings. Complex phenomenon like turbulence, radiation, buoyancy effects etc. have to be correctly simulated to obtain a good approximation of smoke movement.

• Tunnel Ventilation: These simulations are especially useful for designing emergency ventilation systems for tunnels. In case of a fire inside a tunnel, the smoke must be vented out properly so that the vehicle movement inside the tunnel is not adversely effected.
• Welding Smoke Ventilation: Smoke produced from manufacturing processes like welding is very injurious to the workers’ health. Thus, ventilation systems for industries using CFD must be designed to ensure that workers are minimally exposed to harmful gases.

Air Quality Simulations
Improvements in Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) can considerably improve health and productivity of occupants. In certain critical areas like clean rooms, operation theaters etc., IAQ simulations are essential to ensure compliance to required quality standards.

• Mining Ventilation: Ventilation systems for mines are critical in the sense that the mining dust is not only harmful for workers but it is also inflammable. The dust should be properly ventilated out using a well designed ventilation system using CFD.
• Car Parking Ventilation: Removing the pollutants produced by moving and idling vehicles inside the basement car parking area requires the flow of fresh air in all areas of parking space. The ventilation system (especially using jet fans) can be designed optimally only using CFD.

Boilers

• Design and simulation of boilers and steam generators
• Structural - Thermal Analysis
• Boiler tube erosion analysis

Fans, Blowers, Pumps, Compressors, Ducts

• Cooling water pumps, Boiler feed pumps, Forced draught fan, Induced draught fan, Air Compressors etc.
• Simulation of flow for design optimization of impellers, rotors, valves, flow paths, manifolds, ducts etc.
• Structural and vibrations simulation

Electrostatic Precipitators

• Flow and particle capture simulations using CFD techniques
• Mixing Tanks / agitators
• CFD simulations of mixing processes
• Heat Exchangers
• Design of heat exchanger for various applications
• Tube erosion and structural problems

Turbines

• Flow analysis using CFD techniques
• Structural-Thermal analysis for blade design
• Combustion simulation and CFD analysis of combustion chambers

CFD contributes extensively for the automobile sector -parametric study (trends), reduced experimental work etc. Numerical modelling is particularly useful in understanding the flow or looking for qualitative improvements: e.g. optimisation of vehicle soiling pattern on windows. The various specific applications of CFD in the automobile sector are:

• Engine coolant jackets
• Under-hood thermal management
• Passenger compartment comfort
• Prediction of the lift and drag coefficient on a car body
• In-cylinder simulations in an internal combustion engine
• Complete internal combustion engine system: air intake, turbo-charger, engine ports and valves, in-cylinder flow, exhaust and gas after-treatment
• Flow organisation, stability and optimisation
• Detailed look at the flow field, especially in complex geometry
• Optimisation of secondary effects - fuel-air mixture preparation
  Intake Valve and Manifold
• 2-D steady-state incompressible turbulent fluid flow
• Axi-symmetric geometry with a straight intake manifold and fixed valve lift