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Feasibility Study For Large Scale Thermal Convective Flow Measurements In Building Physics

Dirk Michaelis (1), Zhenming Peng (2), Peter Meyer (1), Thomas Brämer (1), Young Jin Jeon (1), Svenja carrigan (2), Oliver Kornadt (2)

1. LaVision GmbH, Goettingen, Germany
2. Rheinland - Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern - Landau, Landau, Germany

DOI:

The Department of Building Physics / Energy-efficient Buildings at the Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau is about to put a novel research-building into commission, the “Small House III”. Among other measurement equipment, a system for volumetric, large-scale, high-resolution flow velocity measurement should be utilized. In this paper, requirements for such a system are detailed, a suitable measurement system is proposed and a feasibility study for the verification of the system requirements is conducted. To this end, a tailored system for large-scale Lagrangian particle tracking (“Shake-the-Box”) is applied to thermal convective flow measurements above an electric radiator close to a wall. As a result, it is found that the designed volumetric velocity measurement system is capable of successfully operating in the design environment without minimal disturbance of the low-speed convection flow. . After a relatively short setup time (about 5 hours, including camera setup, calibration and self-calibration) up to 10000 images at 50 Hz (200 seconds) have been recorded continuously. Shake-the-Box results show a decline of the number of tracked particles from initially 48000 to about 8000 (with a half-life span of about 100 seconds for the helium filled soap bubbles used for seeding). Applying fine scale reconstruction (data assimilation), a vector spacing of 4 mm could be achieved for instantaneous volumetric velocity snapshots. Averaging resulted in a 2 mm vector spacing with an average of 3300 particles per bin and 410 particles per bin for 1 mm vector spacing (with 75% bin overlap). Weaker particles could only be detected in front of a black background. Using a white background (default background for later applications), weak particles could not be detected as well, so the number of detected particles and the measurement volume decreased slightly compared to the black background. Overall, the feasibility study successfully confirmed the readiness of the measurement system for the intended use for “Small House III” measurements.

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