Heater Applied for a Room HVAC — ANSYS Fluent CFD SimulationDescriptionThis project models heat transfer from a wall-mounted radiator inside a room using ANSYS Fluent. The heater, attached to one sidewall, acts as a heat source with a constant heat flux of 1,886.792 W/m², warming the surrounding air and setting up circulation throughout the room. The study focuses on natural convection and buoyancy-driven flow, capturing how a single wall-mounted radiator distributes heat through an enclosed space. As the opening project of the HVAC Engineering: Beginner CFD Training Package, it introduces the most fundamental indoor scenario — buoyancy-driven airflow and heat distribution in a single heated room — laying the groundwork for the ventilation and heating cases that follow.MethodologyThe three-dimensional geometry is created in SpaceClaim, and meshing is performed in ANSYS Meshing with a structured grid totaling 87,865 elements. The heater is defined as a constant heat-flux source of 1,886.792 W/m². The sidewalls and ceiling are 0.2 m thick wood and exchange heat with the outdoors by convection, with an ambient temperature of 280 K and a heat-transfer coefficient of h = 10 W/m²·K. Gravity is included so that the buoyancy-driven motion of the warm air is captured. The energy model is enabled to resolve the conjugate heat transfer between the heater, the room walls, and the room air, capturing the buoyancy-induced circulation.AnalysisPost-processing yields 2D and 3D contours of velocity, temperature, and pressure, along with pathlines and velocity vectors. The results show that the radiator elevates the room air temperature, with the strongest heating and velocity increases near the walls, especially in the vicinity of the heater. From these fields you can evaluate how effectively the radiator warms the space, observe the buoyancy-driven circulation pattern it establishes, and identify warmer and cooler regions within the room.

Single Sided Ventilation in a Room Considering a Heater — ANSYS Fluent CFD SimulationDescriptionThis project analyzes indoor airflow dynamics and thermal behavior within a heated room using natural single-sided ventilation in ANSYS Fluent. The setup features an aluminum heating radiator producing 23,469 W/m³ of thermal output as the primary heat source, while a side-mounted window serves as the natural ventilation outlet, operating at ambient atmospheric pressure with backflow temperatures matching interior conditions. The aim is to characterize the airflow patterns and thermal distribution that develop when a single opening ventilates a heated space — a configuration typical of everyday residential rooms. Within the HVAC Engineering: Beginner CFD Training Package, this project builds on the basic heated-room case by adding an opening, introducing natural ventilation coupled with an internal heat source.MethodologyThe three-dimensional room model was constructed in Design Modeler, with interior dimensions of 2.15 m × 2.16 m × 3.32 m and a rectangular heating unit positioned along the base of one sidewall to represent a typical residential heating configuration. The computational grid was developed in ANSYS Meshing using an unstructured topology of 987,087 cells, providing sufficient resolution to capture the flow and thermal boundary layers.The simulation uses a pressure-based solver under steady-state conditions, combining fluid dynamics with thermal analysis and including gravitational effects (9.81 m/s²) to capture buoyancy. Turbulence is modeled with the realizable k-epsilon model using standard wall functions. The boundary conditions define the window as a pressure outlet at atmospheric conditions, the room surfaces as stationary walls with zero heat flux, and the radiator as a volumetric heat-generation source. Pressure–velocity coupling is handled with the SIMPLE algorithm, with high-order discretization schemes for improved accuracy and standard initialization at atmospheric conditions (101,325 Pa, 300 K).AnalysisThe analysis generates comprehensive flow and thermal field data, including pressure, temperature, and velocity distributions in both 2D and 3D. Velocity vector fields reveal the circulation patterns set up by the interaction between the radiator's buoyant plume and the ventilation flow through the window. Cross-sectional analysis is carried out on XY and YZ planes, with multiple YZ sections examined to fully characterize the three-dimensional nature of the heated room's airflow and thermal behavior. From these results you can assess how effectively the single-sided opening ventilates the space, how heat distributes through the room, and where warm or stagnant regions form.

Cross Ventilation for Swamp Cooler Cooling — ANSYS Fluent CFD SimulationDescriptionWelcome to the Cross Ventilation for Swamp Cooler Cooling CFD Simulation module. This project introduces you to the world of cooling heat transfer, focusing on the practical application of swamp cooler (evaporative cooling) technology in room environments using ANSYS Fluent. Cross ventilation is the natural movement of air through a space that carries heat away, and its performance depends on factors such as building orientation, window placement, and external wind conditions. A swamp cooler adds evaporative cooling to this ventilation flow, lowering the air temperature as it circulates through the room. The module studies how these two mechanisms work together to cool an indoor space, and how CFD can be used to evaluate and improve that cooling. Within the HVAC Engineering: Beginner CFD Training Package, it extends the earlier single-room ventilation cases to two-sided cross-flow combined with evaporative cooling.MethodologyThe setup begins with preparing the room geometry and generating an appropriate mesh, then defining realistic material properties and boundary conditions to represent the cooling and ventilation scenario. The necessary heat-transfer models are configured by selecting a suitable turbulence model for indoor airflow and activating the energy equation to capture the heat transfer. The physics of the problem span the three heat-transfer mechanisms at work in a room — conduction, convection, and radiation — together with the thermal-comfort parameters that define occupant comfort and the working principles of evaporative cooling that govern how effectively the swamp cooler cools the space under different conditions.AnalysisThe results are interpreted through air velocity contours, which reveal the ventilation pattern, and temperature distribution maps, which evaluate cooling effectiveness throughout the room. Building on these, the overall performance of the cooling system is assessed by calculating cooling-efficiency metrics and identifying hot spots and stagnation zones where cooling is ineffective, then proposing improvements to the ventilation strategy. By the end of the project, you will be able to set up and run basic thermal CFD simulations in ANSYS Fluent, interpret the results to assess cooling performance, and apply those insights to real engineering challenges — optimizing room layout for enhanced cooling and supporting the development of energy-efficient climate-control strategies for buildings.

Windcatcher — ANSYS Fluent CFD SimulationDescriptionThis project simulates airflow and natural ventilation in an octagonal windcatcher using ANSYS Fluent. Windcatchers are tall rooftop towers that capture ambient wind to flush out warm, polluted indoor air and drive fresh air into the building. Their internal walls and channels trap and guide the flow downward from the upper intake panels into the occupied space below. The windcatcher sits in a large open-domain environment with a horizontal wind of 10 m/s at atmospheric pressure. As part of the HVAC Engineering: Beginner CFD Training Package, this project introduces a traditional passive-ventilation device, showing how building form alone — with no fan or heat source — can capture and direct outdoor air into a space.MethodologyThe geometry is created in ANSYS DesignModeler and meshed in ANSYS Meshing with an unstructured grid of 2,332,185 cells. This is a fluid-only analysis with no heat transfer. The internal layout above the windcatcher includes barrier surfaces so that some upper inlets face the wind directly while others are shielded. This arrangement establishes a pressure differential: the windward openings promote inflow and traction, while the leeward sides promote suction, together driving circulation through the windcatcher shaft and the room beneath.AnalysisPost-processing provides velocity and pressure contours, along with velocity vectors and pathlines. The windward side of the windcatcher shows higher pressure than the leeward side, confirming the pressure-driven mechanism behind its operation. The flow visualizations show that air enters through the top panels, is guided and trapped by the interior walls, then descends and discharges through the lower panels into the interior — indicating that the windcatcher operates as intended. From these results you can evaluate how effectively the tower captures and directs the incoming wind and assess the ventilation it delivers to the space below.

DescriptionThis module uses ANSYS Fluent to simulate a swamp cooler (evaporative cooling) system applied to building HVAC, a key topic in sustainable climate control engineering. Swamp coolers cool indoor air through water evaporation rather than mechanical refrigeration, offering an energy-efficient alternative to conventional air conditioning in suitable climates. The simulation models how cooled, humidified air distributes through a building space and affects indoor thermal comfort.MethodologyThe building geometry, including the swamp cooler components, is created/imported in ANSYS Fluent, with meshing designed to resolve both room-scale airflow and the finer details of the cooler unit. Boundary conditions define air intake properties (temperature, humidity) at the cooler inlet along with the building envelope's thermal characteristics (walls, windows). A turbulence model suited to low-speed, buoyancy-driven indoor flow is selected, alongside humidity and latent heat transfer modeling to capture the evaporative cooling process and its effect on air properties.ConclusionResults include temperature and humidity contour maps across the cooled space, along with air velocity vector fields used to evaluate air distribution and identify stagnant zones. Cooling efficiency and temperature reduction are quantified, along with estimates of water consumption and energy usage. These results support swamp cooler design optimization across different climates and inform their integration into sustainable, energy-efficient building HVAC systems.

Uniform Floor Heating System — ANSYS Fluent CFD SimulationDescriptionThis project analyzes uniform floor heating in a completely enclosed room using ANSYS Fluent, showing how CFD can be used to evaluate and optimize radiant heating in a controlled space. In a floor-heating system, the entire floor acts as a gentle, distributed heat source, and warmth spreads upward through the room by natural convection rather than from a single localized radiator. The study examines how heat rises from the heated floor, how the air stratifies, and how uniformly the room is warmed. Within the HVAC Engineering: Beginner CFD Training Package, this project introduces distributed radiant heating and the goal of thermal-comfort uniformity, shifting the focus from ventilation toward heating performance itself.MethodologyThe geometry is a simple, perfectly sealed rectangular room with a uniform floor heating element, prepared for CFD analysis with attention to mesh quality and refinement near the heated floor and the room boundaries. The walls and ceiling are treated as adiabatic surfaces, while the heated floor provides the thermal boundary condition that drives the flow. Air is modeled with the ideal-gas law so that the density variations responsible for buoyancy are captured, and radiation properties are configured so that all relevant heat-transfer mechanisms are accounted for. A turbulence model suited to enclosed natural convection is selected, and convergence strategies appropriate to the challenging, low-velocity thermal flow are applied.AnalysisPost-processing produces temperature contours and velocity vector fields that visualize the thermal stratification and airflow, along with streamlines that illustrate the convection-cell structure within the enclosed space. From these you can interpret the vertical temperature gradients, assess how uniformly the floor heats the room, and evaluate the heat-transfer rate from the floor to the room air. The setup also supports parametric study — varying floor temperature or room aspect ratio to see how heating dynamics and comfort respond. By the end of this project, you'll be able to set up a natural-convection simulation for an enclosed heated space, apply the ideal-gas model and appropriate turbulence treatment, and interpret temperature and airflow fields to evaluate heating uniformity, thermal comfort, and energy efficiency.

Double Skin Façade — ANSYS Fluent CFD SimulationDescriptionThis project simulates airflow within a building's double-skin façade (DSF) using ANSYS Fluent. A double-skin façade is a building envelope with an air cavity between two layers, where solar-heated air rises by buoyancy — providing passive heating and aiding ventilation and cooling inside the building. The study evaluates the buoyancy-driven circulation set up within this cavity when the glazed outer layer absorbs solar energy. Within the HVAC Engineering: Beginner CFD Training Package, this project couples solar gain with buoyancy-driven airflow inside the building envelope, moving from single-room ventilation toward the behavior of the building skin itself.MethodologyThe three-dimensional geometry, built in DesignModeler, is a rectangular cavity measuring 0.6 × 3.2 × 5 m, composed of a duct for airflow and a glazed section that absorbs solar heat. The openings include a 0.2 m rectangular inlet at the bottom of the glass wall and a 0.2 m outlet near the top. Meshing in ANSYS Meshing yields 490,725 elements.The glass section is modeled with a volumetric heat generation of 6,940 W/m³ to represent solar gain. The building walls are brick and subject to convection to the interior at T = 300 K with a heat-transfer coefficient of h = 23 W/m²·K (free convection). Supply air enters the façade at 304.55 K and atmospheric pressure. To capture the buoyancy effect, the air density follows the ideal-gas law and gravity of 9.81 m/s² is applied, so the temperature differences generated by the solar gain drive the flow.AnalysisPost-processing provides 2D and 3D pressure, velocity, and temperature contours, along with 2D and 3D velocity vectors. The vectors show an upward flow within the cavity, confirming the buoyancy-driven ventilation within the double-skin façade. From these results you can evaluate how effectively the façade drives passive airflow, how the solar gain distributes heat through the cavity, and how the design contributes to ventilation and thermal regulation of the building.

DescriptionThis project investigates steady airflow (ventilation) within a storage container room containing two internal walls, simulated using ANSYS Fluent and studied through CFD analysis. Proper ventilation of this kind is a core HVAC concern, since maintaining a consistent airflow is essential for effective cooling and air distribution in storage environments.The three-dimensional geometry was created in Design Modeler, and meshing was performed in ANSYS Meshing. A structured mesh was used, comprising 115,635 elements.MethodologyHere, ANSYS Fluent is used to examine steady airflow through a storage container room fitted with two walls. Such container rooms are commonly used to store perishable industrial goods, which must be kept under continuous, steady airflow to ensure adequate cooling and ventilation.In this study, the airflow is simulated within a 0.5 × 0.5 × 1 m chamber containing two walls positioned across the flow path, representing the storage enclosure. Air enters the domain at a velocity of 5 m/s and accelerates to a maximum of roughly 20 m/s after passing over the second wall, as a result of the constricting geometry.The standard k-epsilon turbulence model, together with the energy equation, was enabled to resolve the turbulent flow field and compute the temperature distribution throughout the domain.ConclusionOnce the solution converged, two-dimensional contours of pressure, velocity, and streamlines were obtained. As shown, the inlet air velocity of 5 m/s rises to a peak of about 20 m/s owing to the geometry of the enclosure.The normal force exerted on the domain walls is 15.8526 N. Intense turbulence is observed in the region between the two walls, where the turbulent kinetic energy reaches values as high as 2 J/kg.

Server Room Cooling with 6 Cabinets — ANSYS Fluent CFD SimulationDescriptionServer rooms generate large amounts of heat, and keeping that heat within a safe band is critical: manufacturers typically specify an operating range of about 10–32 °C, and drifting below or above that range creates unstable conditions that threaten the equipment. Cooling is therefore one of the core challenges in data-center design, alongside airflow planning, power redundancy, and fire suppression. This project uses ANSYS Fluent to model the airflow and temperature distribution inside a six-cabinet server room and determine whether the cooling keeps every rack within the safe thermal range. Within the HVAC Engineering: Beginner CFD Training Package, it introduces forced-convection thermal management with multiple heat sources in a realistic data-center layout — a step up from the passive and natural-ventilation cases earlier in the package.MethodologyThe room is modeled in three dimensions in Design Modeler, measuring 7 × 4 × 2 m, with six server cabinets each measuring 1 × 0.6 × 1.8 m arranged as heat sources. The domain is meshed in ANSYS Meshing with a structured grid of 448,000 elements.The simulation treats the room as a forced-convection problem. Cool air enters at 15 °C, and each of the six cabinet racks is modeled as a 400 W heat source. Because forced convection dominates over natural convection here, air density is taken as constant. The key variable studied is the inlet air speed, run at two values — 0.5 m/s and 1 m/s — to see how supply velocity affects how well the racks are cooled. The goal is to find conditions that hold the entire room within the safe sub-32 °C range.AnalysisAt the end of the solution, you generate 2D and 3D contours of temperature and streamlines, along with plots of the maximum and average fluid temperature. The results tell a clear engineering story: at the lower inlet speed of 0.5 m/s, the maximum-temperature condition is not satisfied — parts of the room exceed the safe 32 °C limit. Raising the inlet speed to 1 m/s brings the maximum temperature down to around 30 °C, back inside the safe band. In other words, increasing the supply airflow directly improves rack cooling and resolves the overheating. By the end of this project, you'll be able to set up a 3D forced-convection cooling simulation with multiple heat sources, run a comparative study across inlet conditions, and use temperature contours and bulk-temperature plots to verify that a cooling design meets a required thermal limit.

DescriptionAtrium ventilation design sits at the core of HVAC engineering, where architectural form and airflow management intersect to deliver daylight, natural ventilation, and thermal comfort within large interior spaces. Atriums, tracing back to Roman architecture and now commonly built as multi-story volumes with glazed roofs, rely on carefully engineered air movement to function effectively. This project uses ANSYS Fluent to model internal airflow within a building complex featuring a cylindrical central atrium, where air enters through a lower inlet at 2 m/s and 101,325 Pa and exits through an upper outlet, replicating the buoyancy-assisted ventilation pattern typical of atrium spaces.MethodologyThe three-dimensional geometry of the building complex and its cylindrical atrium is constructed in SpaceClaim. The domain is discretized in ANSYS Meshing using an unstructured grid of approximately 2,500,000 elements, with local refinement applied near interior boundaries to better resolve flow gradients in regions where airflow behavior changes most sharply.Results AnalysisThe simulation examines pressure and velocity distributions to characterize overall airflow behavior throughout the atrium. Outputs include two-dimensional and three-dimensional contours of pressure and velocity, along with pathlines and velocity vectors that trace air movement through the space. These results support identification of zones with favorable comfort conditions, providing insight relevant to ventilation strategy and occupant comfort in atrium-centered building designs.