Three-dimensional turbulent flow inside a fume cupboard and a room

When a fume cupboard is placed in a room, the air flow inside and around the fume cupboard is truely a three-dimensional turbulent flow. The understanding of the air flow and then the convection of contaminant in the vicinity of the working aperture is crucial in the containment testing of the fume cupboard and in order to do so, the computation domain should include both the fume cupboard and the room. Therefore, in this paper we have developed a CFD code, fl3d, which uses the k - epsilon turbulent model and the wall function technique, to calculate the three-dimensional turbulent flow both inside a fume cupboard and in the room. Accurate numerical results have been obtained over a wide range of operating conditions when using the code fl3d on a fine grid for which it was impossible to obtain a solution when using the commercial package, FLUENT.