EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION ON THE ENHANCEMENT OF NATURAL UP DRAFTING IN A CHIMNEY

The global initiative to go green and the potential benefits in terms of operational cost, energy requirement and carbon emissions have raised more interest than ever to develop passive ventilation systems. Significant amount of research work have been done on chimneys since the 1990s, most studies focuses on the effects of geometry and the inclination angle of the ventilation performance of the solar chimney. However, published studies showed that natural passive ventilation has not been fully understood. The objectives of this research are to identify the effective design parameters on natural up drafting using top cup of a chimney and to investigate the influence of the design parameters on the up drafting. The parameters investigated are the various design angles of the chimney cup from 180˚ to 90˚ and the position of the chimney cup varying from 3cm to 7.5cm from the tip of the chimney. Numerical investigation were carried out by using ANSYS 15.0 Fluent simulation while experimental investigation involved setting up the experiment setup, conduct test and obtain measurements of actual velocities and temperature readings.