Precision Ventilation in an Open-Plan Office: A New Application of Active Chilled Beam (ACB) with a JetCone Feature

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

A brief summary

The research presented showed an exciting concept of Active Chilled Beams ventilation for achieving local thermal comfort. This study aimed to present efficient air mixing with optimal air velocity around occupants to fulfil individual thermal comfort requirements, according to different metabolic rates of the occupants. Analyses used full-scale laboratory experiments and computational fluid dynamic simulations to achieve the ventilation system's performance.

 

General concept comments

In my opinion, more could be gained from CFD. Because in the thermal comfort chapter, you only list measurements in the test room where the measuring point density was low.

 

Specific comments

In the test description, I would state the heat transfer coefficient and emissivity of the test room envelope. Were there any solar sources?

I recommended including the draught rate (DR) in the thermal comfort criteria.

I recommended specifying mesh type, numbers of elements, and the quality of the mesh.

The statement I cite: "The RNG k-ε turbulence model was selected for the simulations due to better accuracy than other RANS models for indoor airflow simulations [32] " I recommended supported with further references.

For graphical results (Figure 11 -13), using the velocity and temperature distribution along the height of the occupied zone would be interesting.

Validation of CFD with an experiment would deserve a more detailed description and evaluation.

The quality and size of the figures was poor and should be improved.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper titled "Precision Ventilation in an open-plan office: a new application of Active Chilled Beam (ACB) with a JetCone feature" can be interesting for the research community working towards increasing thermal comfort inside the offices/ buildings. The paper is written very well. The presented work has experimental as well as numerical simulation results. Discussion of the problem and approach considered for the work is quite rigorous and relevant. The paper can be accepted with just minor comments/suggestions,
1. Equations for PMV and PPD should be included
2. The velocity values seem to be very low and it will be very difficult to measure it. However, authors have reported that they measured it and having 5% uncertainty. I guess, it should be very higher for such a low velocity measure instruments. Kindly clarify it.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf