Large Eddy Simulation of Air Escape through a Hospital Isolation Room Single Hinged Doorway—Validation by Using Tracer Gases and Simulated Smoke Videos

Saarinen, Pekka E.; Kalliomäki, Petri; Tang, Julian W.; Koskela, Hannu

The accuracy of the time-marching, when measured by the Courant number, was good. The maximal Courant number stayed well below one almost all the time. There were only two occasions of noteworthy excess of 1. The first occasion was just in the beginning of the door-opening, where the maximal Courant number momentarily rose to 5.68. Another occasion was the moment of door-closing, when the maximal Courant number reached the value 4.12. These values are not critical, and shortening the time step at these instances does not alter the results significantly, as shown by Fig 8. A recommended test of spatial resolution is to rerun the simulation by using a denser mesh. However, this was not practical due to the large computation time. Also, because of memory limitations, significant mesh refinement would not have been possible.