System Simulation for HVAC

Presenter: Christian Kehrer, Altair [on behalf of Oliver Höfert, Simulation Engineer at Kampmann]

The increasing virtualization of engineering methods is inevitable. This also holds true for the design of systems that take care for the thermal well-being of humans, e.g. in buildings. If it comes to simulation of so-called HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) systems, very often high fidelity approaches like CFD are connected to it. In contrary, this contribution illustrates a 1D modeling approach of a heat exchanger in use of Altair Activate. The presentation explains the implementation of the NTU (Number of Transfer Units) method in a system simulation environment. This includes a short description of the approach itself as well as its current limits. Based on the implementation of a single cell, differing network configurations for the evaluation of use cases of varying complexity will be shown.