During the first seminar of Easter term, PhD student Dan Toy presented his recent work on building ventilation. Over the last few years, Dan has been studying how the temperature profile in a room with displacement ventilation evolves when the ventilation rate is increased. He ran laboratory experiments, which showed that a layer of hot air develops at the top of a room even when the ventilation is very large. Motivated by these observations, Dan has developed a new model for the thermal stratification of the room, based on the balance between the kinetic energy of the plume and the energy required to mix the air across the thermal stratification. Some of the results of Dan’s work have already been published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and you can read more about them here.