Analysis of the Effects of a Swing Door Opening on Indoor Airflow Fields—An Experimental Study

Occupant interactions with built environments significantly influence indoor airflow patterns. Among these interactions, door openings are common, which affect airflow fields and contribute to the dispersion of airborne contaminants. The wakes originating from alterations in airflow patterns contribute to the transport of pollutants and must be carefully considered for system design in critical environments to avoid cross-contamination of susceptible bodies (e.g., patients, precision manufacturing, etc.). Therefore, knowledge about the movement patterns of these wakes is crucial in the context of indoor air quality. In this study, a series of experiments were conducted in a controlled chamber under two different schemes of a swing door opening and three different flow regimes to study the turbulent vortices produced from door openings and their spatiotemporal propagation. Additionally, an enhanced event-based modeling (EBM) approach was employed to develop a data-driven prediction of the transient indoor air patterns resulting from door-opening activities. The results suggest a significant effect of a door opening on indoor airflow fields. The velocity fields demonstrate that consecutive openings under different ventilation conditions have a prolonged impact on the propagation of door-opening-induced wakes farther into the test chamber. The quantification of the change in kinetic energy from the door opening also shows that the level of ventilation governs the flow patterns resulting from human-induced perturbation of the steady-state flow fields. The EBM approach effectively approximated the airflow patterns and demonstrated its potential to predict transient airflow disturbances caused by door operations.