Industrial natural ventilation systems consist of gravity ventilator, the high/low windows and doors. Especially, the high windows play an important role in the industrial natural ventilation systems. Generally speaking, industrial high windows are divided into 3 types; louver type, 45° open type and 90° open type. This study was numerically and experimentally conducted. Three types of windows were tested to know the ventilation characteristics and estimate the ventilation efficiencies. Numerically, computational fluid dynamics software (AIR PAK Ver. 2.0) was used to observe the flow characteristics inside the industrial building and the concentration contours generated by the tracer gas method. Experimentally, the flow visualization technique and the tracer gas method were applied with the model building to characterize the flow pattern inside the model building and to estimate the ventilation efficiencies with the different windows. It was found that 90° open type window was most effective for the discharge of pollutants from the industrial building. On the other hand, the louver type window was found to be less effective than any other windows.
Industrial ventilation is a crucial engineering measure to protect workers from hazardous airborne contaminants. Designing a ventilation system is not an easy task. To solve this problem, many U. S. computer programs and softwares have been developed. In Korea, asoftware, called as VPMC, was developed by Korea Industrial Safety Corporation. But VPMC could not stand alone since it can be used to design not a hood, but a ventilation system. In this research, therefore, a preprocessing software was developed. It can be used to design general ventilation system, canopy hood, open surface tank hood. The program was written in Microsoft Visual Basic. In near future, this software will be incorporated into a total package software which can be used to design a whole ventilation system.