Zonal Modeling for simulating indoor environment of buildings: Review, recent developments, and applications

Zonal models are an intermediate approach between computational fluid dynamics and simple nodal models. They have the ability to take into account various phenomena ignored by one-node and multizone models, such as temperature and contaminants distributions, thermal integration with cold facade, draft, asymmetric thermal radiation, and cold or hot floor surfaces. Single and multizone models are inadequate to obtain information required for many applications because the fundamental assumption of heat and mass balance models is that the air in each zone is well stirred with uniform temperature and contaminant concentration. Zonal models are based on an approximate partitioning of a room into a number of sub-zones and have been used for modeling indoor and outdoor environments. Recently, this approach has been used to predict physical parameters in a number of case studies, including the urban microclimate effects on the building energy demand for the case of a street canyon due to the heat island affect; the combination of a system of stratified air conditioning and natural ventilation for large enclosures; and the prediction of the distribution of indoor air parameters in a space. In this paper, a comprehensive literature review has been carried out that covers the basic principles of zonal models, their development, and their application over the last three decades.