Effect of Supply and Return Locations of a Floor-Supply Cooling System on Thermal Comfort

This study numerically investigates thermal comfort of a space cooled by a floor-supply air-conditioning system, in which three different combinations of supply and return locations, one floor-supply/ceiling-return and two floor-supply/floor-return, are treated. A complementary experiment is performed to validate the present numerical analysis, and the prediction agrees favorably with the measured data. In the numerical procedure, a simplified model mimicking the inlet flow through a diffuser is developed for efficient simulations. The calculated results show that the ceiling-return type is far better in terms of thermal comfort than the floor-return ones within the extent of this study, which seems to be caused by effective vertical penetration of the supply air against natural convection. It is also revealed that the arrangement of port locations in the floor-supply/floor-return system has insignificant effect on the cooling performance. For selecting a proper system, other characteristics including the heating performance should be accounted for simultaneously with the present considerations.