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Modeling air filter in EnergyPlus to capture particulates during natural ventilation between indoors and outdoors

I am attempting to incorporate a filter into my EnergyPlus model that captures fine particulates (PM2.5) as air flows between inside and outside through natural ventilation, or between zones. Something similar to the transparent window-mounted air filter discussed here by Liu et al..

My inclination is to model PM2.5 transport with the Generic Contaminant components and operable windows through Airflow Network objects such as AirflowNetwork:MultiZone:Component:SimpleOpening or AirflowNetwork:MultiZone:Component:DetailedOpening. Ideally I would specify the filter efficiency and perhaps a pressure drop across the filter.

Does anyone have advice on incorporating a filter to capture my generic contaminant (PM2.5) in the airflow network path? Am I on the right track with these components, or is there a workaround required?

JustinLueker's avatar
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JustinLueker
asked 2019-03-04 09:38:40 -0500
__AmirRoth__'s avatar
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__AmirRoth__
updated 2019-03-05 10:13:59 -0500
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2 Answers

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As far as I know, in EnergyPlus (by itself) you'd need some sort of workaround, but there might be an EMS-based approach that I'm not aware of. A couple of options that might work if the simulation you wish to do doesn't couple with the energy simulation in any way are (1) write out all the linkage flows and put together the contaminant simulation yourself or (2) write out all the zone temperatures and use that to schedule a CONTAM model's zone temperature. I've used that second option several times with some success. The downside of scheduling all the zonal temperatures is that it takes some work to get that all connected up correctly and it is easy to make mistakes. CONTAM's cosimulation feature would do this more directly and might require less model-specific work. And it's probably a more general solution.

Jason DeGraw's avatar
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Jason DeGraw
answered 2019-06-13 21:20:30 -0500
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Jason is correct that co-simulation will provide a more general approach that allows you to directly incorporate filters in airflow paths. I suppose (I have not done this) you could also implement one of the contaminant removal methods offered by EnergyPlus, e.g., deposition velocity or rate. I'm not sure if EnergyPlus tracks the amount of removal, but CONTAM will. Further, CONTAM will enable you to partition the particles into more size bins and associate these bins with different filtration and deposition rates.

Stuart Dols's avatar
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Stuart Dols
answered 2019-06-14 09:03:18 -0500
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