Numerical Study on PollutantRemoval Performance of Island Kitchen Exhaust Devices

Abstract: It is reported that cooking can generate many kinds of airborne pollutants,which pose serious threats to human health. Kitchen range-hood is themost effective and popular equipment to exhaust the airborne pollutants,including smoke and oil particle in people’s daily life. The lack of astandardized and overall approach to test and evaluate range-hood makesboth consumer and some manufacturers confused. For these reasons,Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory published a report, whichshowed the results of their elaborate experiment and some conclusion.However, they also pointed out that due to the limitation of the apparatus,some of the results are not reliable.Therefore, this project established a numerical model in Fluent toinvestigate the pollutant removal performance. Many attempts had beenmade before a validated numerical model was accomplished because aproper model needs the balance between iteration time and resultaccuracy. The validation part is presented in the literature. The captureefficiency curve of the numerical model and one of experiments show agood agreement at the low power input. Some conclusions are drawn onhow power inputs and height affect the capture efficiency, respectively.Dimensionless analysis is done to find a general characteristic curve forevaluating the removal performance of a particular range-hood.