Truncation method for calculating the resistance of ventilation air-conditioning duct systems under nonfully developed flow boundary conditions

Calculating the resistance of ventilation air-conditioning ducts under nonfully developed flow is a crucial problem that must be addressed. Based on the characteristics of the resistance in ventilation air-conditioning ducts, the truncation method—a computational method that is appropriate for nonfully developed flow boundary conditions—was proposed in this study. The resistance distributions in the upstream and downstream ducts from typical local components, including reducers, bends and tee ducts, were investigated. Using the resistance values of the local components under fully developed flow, the resistances that did not belong to nonfully developed flow were truncated and removed. Finally, the calculation steps of the proposed method were discussed, an engineering case study was presented, and the accuracy of the developed model was analyzed. The results showed that for the local components in the system (reducers, bends and tee ducts), their proportions of the total resistance exhibited similar trends under different width-to-height ratios. The resistance of these local components included upstream resistance, downstream resistance and their own resistance. The upstream resistance accounted for 2%-6% of the total resistance, whereas the downstream resistance of the reducers, bends and tee ducts accounted for 40%-60% of the total resistance. A functional relationship was established between the local resistance and cutoff distance of the reducers, bends and tee ducts. Hence, the truncation method can calculate the local resistance from the cutoff distance. Moreover, in the presented engineering case study, the error between the actual measured resistance values and those simulated with the truncation method was only 4.28%, which was far less than that of the results simulated with the traditional calculation methods (53.64%).