Concept and calculation method of local cooling/heating load applied to non-uniform indoor environment.

Traditionally, the definition and calculation of room load is based on the assumption that indoor environment is mixed uniformly. Actually, the indoor environment is non-uniform and only one or some local zones need to be controlled. In order to calculate the cooling/heating load in anon-uniform indoor environment, a new concept, Local Cooling/Heating Load (LC/HL), is proposed in the paper. An office room with two kinds of air distribution systems and two kinds of heat sources distribution is adopted to demonstrate and discuss the LC/HL with CFD tool. The results show that the LC/HL can be greater or less than the whole room load, which depends on the air distribution and the heat sources distribution.