Uniform Floor Heating System

Uniform Floor Heating System — ANSYS Fluent CFD Simulation

Description

This 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.

Methodology

The 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.

Analysis

Post-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.