Abstract:
Room air flow and air exchange are important aspects for the design of
energy-efficient buildings. As a result, simulations are increasingly used
prior to construction to achieve an energy-efficient design. We present a
visual analysis of air flow generated at building entrances, which uses a
combination of revolving doors and air curtains. The resulting flow pattern
is challenging because of two interacting flow patterns: On the one hand, the
revolving door acts as a pump, on the other hand, the air curtain creates a
layer of uniformly moving warm air between the interior of the building and
the revolving door. Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS), which by definition
are flow barriers, are the method of choice for visualizing the separation
and recirculation behavior of warm and cold air flow. The extraction of LCS
is based on the finite-time Lyapunov exponent (FTLE) and makes use of a ridge
definition which is consistent with the concept of weak LCS. Both FTLE
computation and ridge extraction are done in a robust and efficient way by
making use of the fast Fourier transform for computing scale-space
derivatives.