Internal Flow in an Atrium

Description

Atrium 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.

Methodology

The 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 Analysis

The 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.