IESVE CFD Airflow Simulation Software

Move up to the fastest and easiest in CFD airflow simulation analysis

CFD Airflow Simulation Software

From consideration of passive architectural layouts to optimization of HVAC system designs, IESVE offers the most practical, efficient, and accurate CFD software available.

  • Efficiently input 3D geometry, boundary conditions, internal gains and furniture for accurate CFD simulation. 
  • Include ventilation from passive sources (e.g. operable windows) or mechanical devices (e.g. diffusers). 
  • MicroFlo-CFD performs ‘snapshot’ CFD simulation by importing boundary conditions from APACHE’s dynamic simulation or allows manual boundary conditions to be added.
  • Share insights from in-depth visualization output analysis, and iterate on building design options. 
Air temperature, velocity and pressure
Carbon Monoxide (CO), Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and water vapor
Age of air, and Air Change Effectiveness (ACE)
Occupant thermal comfort (PPD, PMV, Operative Temperature)

CFD Use Cases

Passive Natural Ventilation Design

Consider façade design options with single-sided ventilation (e.g. low opening and high opening) versus cross ventilation as shown.  

MicroFlo Natural Ventilation

Passive Atrium Design

An atrium typically spans several floors in height, receives solar heat gain from a large glazed roof and so can frequently benefit from a CFD simulation to understand airflow patterns and overheating assessments.

MicroFlo Atrium

Data Centers Design

Consider hot-aisle containment or cold-aisle containments in mission-critical data halls. Track particles with floor-level supply diffusers to ensure containment is achieved and that racks are safely maintained with acceptable ambient conditions.

CFD Data Center

Hospital Operating Room Design

Ensure safe conditions for hospital patients during critical surgery periods. Track particles with ceiling-level laminar supply diffusers to ensure containment is achieved with low-level exhausts. Age of Air CFD Simulations may be complete to ensure compliance with ASHRAE Standard 170.

CFD Operating Room

HVAC Design: Thermal Comfort

Consider the impact on Occupant Thermal Comfort with a range of HVAC system options, including active chilled beams, overhead 4-way louvred diffusers or wall diffusers, and displacement ventilation with in-floor swirl diffusers.  

CFD HVAC Comfort

External Wind Studies

Ensure safe conditions for pedestrians due to negative/positive wind pressures and evaluate risks for high wind-speeds when operable windows may need to be opened/closed.  Large urban environments may be automatically imported using the ModelIT feature: Open Street Map. 

CFD HVAC Comfort

Normal Use Ventilation of Car Parks

Study carbon monoxide concentration levels inside car parks to determine how much airflow is achieved and examine typical scenarios to see how carbon monoxide is distributed. Meet local ventilation regulations, such as Part F in the UK, which requires ventilation rate is designed and equipment is installed to limit the carbon monoxide to: (a) an average concentration of not more than 30 ppm parts per million over an eight hour period; and (b) peak concentrations, such as by ramps and exits, of not more than 90 ppm for periods not exceeding 15 minutes.

MicroFlo-CFD Technical Simulation Features

  • Automatic grid generation based on the shape of the computational domain (model), openings and components (furniture).
  • Grid regions can be added and edited to modify the density between fixed gridlines; e.g. at a surface boundary.
  • CFD components may be solid or non-solid; they may be custom-created and saved to a user-library for future reuse. 
  • CFD Simulation monitor to display progress.
  • Ability to pause CFD Simulation, review preliminary results and (re)continue CFD Simulation.
  • Turbulence Models include options for K-epsilon (default) and Constant effective viscosity. 
  • Default initial surface temperatures are applied by default. This is ignored if the boundary conditions file is available to be imported from ApacheSim (VistaPro). 
  • Discretisation options include Upwind (default), Hybrid and Power Law
  • The range, scale and colour of contours and vectors can be adjusted to improve results visualisation. 
  • Outputs include images and videos. 
  • Maximum cell size achieved have exceeded 50 million cells (VE-2022 onwards, using a 64 bit application)
     

MicroFlo - CFD

Our MicroFlo application allows you to undertake internal or external airflow and thermal studies using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

Find out more

Additional Resources

On-Demand Learning

Free Computational Fluid Dynamics Course

Article

Simulating Ventilation Strategies to Reduce Risks of Indoor Infectious Disease Transmission

Article

CFD Simulation for Hospital Operating Rooms (ORs)

Got a Question?

Contact our team to find out more about our airflow tools in the Virtual Environment.