Computational fluid dynamics: An advanced active tool in environmental management and education

The improvement in the quality of life together with thermal comfort, air quality, health, workplace security and energy conservation measures justify the integral education of environmental (outdoor and/or indoor) phenomena. Environmental education, through the appropriate tool, can play an important and vital role in this domain. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is the analysis of systems involving fluid flow, heat transfer and associated phenomena such as distribution of pollutants by means of computer‐based simulation. This technique, allowing the simulation and the visualization of environmental problems, represents a powerful tool to motivate, guide and educate on the environment. The main objective of this paper is to introduce this new advanced active tool in environmental education, directed to indoor‐environment quality, that permits the prediction and visualization of air movement, air temperature and air contaminant (such as tobacco smoke) distribution in rooms. With suitable mathematical models and boundary conditions, a computational code has been developed to predict and visualize these phenomena. In order to demonstrate its applicability, the simulation of air contamination distribution in an office room with a smoker was performed.