Evolution Characteristics of Indoor Pollutant Concentration in Buoyancy-Driven Natural Ventilation

Evolution of pollutant concentration at different heights was analyzed to explore the evolution rule of indoor gaseous pollutants during a period from buoyacy-driven natural ventilation to steady state. Firstly, according to the non-uniform three-layer model used to examine the transient flows driven by buoyancy force, two theoretical models that correspond to homogeneous mix and pure displacement were developed for the different mixing characteristics of the inoor lower-layer pollutants. Then, the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method was adopted to find a iterative solution, and the height and concentration variation characteristics of the indoor pollutants during the ventilation process were obtained. Finally, the effects of the effective ventilation area and buoyancy combination coefficient on pollutant concentration was discussed. The results show that, the thermal stratification interface with zero vertical velocity greatly differs from the fresh air layer interface, and the height difference between thermal stratification interfaces will have a larger peak value and a shorter time to reach steady state when the dimensionless effective ventilation area becomes larger. The greater buoyancy combination coefficient is, the greater the height difference between thermal stratification interfaces at any time is, which becomes more obvious with the increase of the dimensionless effective ventilation area. The mixing characteristics of lower-layer pollutants affect the stratification and time evolution, but do not change the concentration distribution in steady state, and the upper layer has the highest pollutant concentration for both models. For the pure-displacement model, the pollutant concentration of the original layer decreases until it reaches stability, and the lower-layer pollutant concentration remains constant, while that of the upper layer increases sharply in the initial stage before decaying. Meanwhile, the average pollutant concentration of the upper and lower layers both slowly decay to a stable value for the homogeneous mix model. Furthermore, a larger dimensionless effective ventilation area can result in a faster decay of the dimensionless pollutant on the pollutant concentration can be almost ignored.