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Ventilating electrical rooms with intense heat emission sources is imperative to prevent workers’ injury and damage to equipment. This paper investigates by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) the performance of seven proposed ventilation schemes for a multi-zone transformer room of an indoor substation in Beirut city. To this end, an indoor multi-zone substation with four transformers was simulated using ANSYS/Fluent 15.0 with different proposed ventilation schemes. The location of inlet louvers was fix, while the positions of four exhaust outlets were changed throughout the CFD simulations to determine the best-case scenario providing the lowest levels of temperatures in the operating zone and in the vicinity of transformers. The analysis showed that the cooling effect improves as the elevation of the exhaust fans decreases. The obtained results can be used to make some recommendations for design and optimization of similar ventilation projects of indoor transformer rooms.
ventilation schemes, numerical modeling, transformer substation, turbulent flow, thermal field
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