Can air curtains be used to build a non-uniform indoor environment and save energy?

Air curtain is efficient to confine a certain space in the traditional application. In this paper, air curtain is utilized to create a local indoor environment. The energy saving potential is numerically investigated by a typical room. The indices such as air curtain effectiveness and curtain COP are adopted to evaluate the performance in different heat source characteristics conditions. The influence of heat proportion, total heat amount, working station amount and wall conditions are taken into consideration. The results show that air curtain has the ability to create a non-uniform indoor environment, and the maximum temperature difference on the two sides of air curtain can be maintained 7.4°C. Air curtain is especially useful if the heat source is mainly concentrated in the unoccupied space, but is useless if the whole room is occupied or the heat is mainly in the occupied zone.