Affiliations 

  • 1 Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia
MyJurnal

Abstract

Local exhaust ventilation (LEV) is used in industries to capture contaminants such as gases, dusts, mists, vapours or fumes out of workstations to protect occupants’ exposure to contaminants. LEV is allocated and installed by employers, however it doesn’t work accordingly. LEV design is often overlooked and underappreciated. Effectiveness of LEV system can be achieved if more attention is focused to proper design of LEV system. To solve this issue, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be performed. CFD is a software tool to predict and simulate fluid dynamic phenomena. CFD is used to forecast or reconstruct the behaviour of an engineering product under assumed or measure boundary conditions. However, CFD is just a prediction tool, which can lead to inaccuracy of predicting airflow due to problems with pre-processing, solver and post-processing with parameter from actual experimental results. Therefore, validation is needed to help minimizing percentage error of CFD methods. In this research, measurements of airflow parameter of LEV system at National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Bangi, Selangor were conducted. Control Speed panel found at NIOSH Bangi, which is used to increase or decrease speed of fan, was performed using Control Speed of 20%, 40% 60% and 80%. Upon validation, average absolute error obtained from four different control speeds ranges from 3.372% to 4.862%. Validity of CFD modelling is acceptable, which is less than 5% and good agreement is achieved between actual experimental results and CFD simulation results. Therefore, it can be concluded that CFD software tool can be performed to simulate air velocity in LEV system. CFD methods can save labour costs and time consumption when it is used during earliest stage of LEV design, before actual construction is implemented. The outcome of this paper can be used as a baseline for factories equipped with LEV system to protect occupants’ exposure to contaminants.