Review on Air Distribution and Its Impact on Indoor Environment

Air conditioning is becoming essential in providing human comfort in commercial and residential spaces. The conditioned air provides comfort to the occupants of the spaces and goods are protected from being deteriorate. The conditioned air is required to be maintained at certain desired physical condition with defined temperature, humidity and velocity of flow. The objective of this paper is to present the work being done on air distribution technology and the effect of air distribution on indoor environment. It was found that the air distribution is not given much importance while other aspects of air conditioning such as air conditioning methods, alternative refrigerants and system modifications for energy savings are focused by the researchers. Since without proper air distribution in the conditioned space indoor thermal environment can not be produced which can ensure human comfort, it is this field in which work is required to be done. The authors found that many alternative technologies and air distribution methods are possible to improve air distribution and also energy consumption in air distribution can also be reduced by adopting proper method of air distribution. It was also reviewed through literature that for the analysis of the air distribution arrangements modern analysis method of using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool is gaining importance than the experimental method because of having advantages of using CFD in time and cost saving. Keywords: Air conditioning; Air Distribution; Thermal Comfort