Characterisation and analysis of indoor tornado for contaminant removal and emergency ventilation

As an essential emergency management strategy, innovative emergency ventilation schemes that can quickly remove infectious and fatal contaminants without further spreading are highly demanded for public and commercial buildings. This study numerically investigated a vortex flow driven ventilation in a model room to explore the dynamic characteristics and 3D visualisation of vortex-driven indoor tornados. Four approaches to identify the core region of the indoor tornado were developed and compared against each other. By successfully capturing the continuously changing centre of the vortex and significant core region size variations at different heights, the swirl vector method was recommended as a quantifiable approach to identify the core region of indoor tornados. The numerical outcomes also revealed a strong connection between the lift angle, vortex intensity, overall size of indoor tornado and maximum size of core region. The best contaminants control and removal was achieved at lift angle of 20° in this study and an optimum lift angle ranging from 10° to 20° was recommended for future study.