The kitchen is an essential part of a household in which stoves are used to carry out cooking activities. Cooking produces pollutant emissions, which directly impacts the indoor air quality. A large number of pollutants are produced in a short period of cooking time. It is best to remove these pollutants immediately at the time of cooking, and range hoods are currently the best solution. However, this solution is only good if its capture efficiency is good and therefore it is critical to know how to calculate and maximize this efficiency.
Range hoods can only remove some fraction of the cooking pollutants before they blend into the kitchen air and the surroundings. In the literature, capture efficiency has been defined in different ways. It …show more content…
For them, capture efficiency equals the ratio of the captured flow rate to the total plume flow rate at the range hood. A year later Li et al [2] also argued that design methods or kitchen hood analyses that do not use the buoyancy capture principle will not produce very meaningful results. Other published experimental studies such as Farnsworth et al. [3] Singer et al. [4] and Rim et al. [5] show that capture performance increases with increase in suction flow rate and that the pollutants from the back burner are captured much more than the front burner.
The effort described in this paper was initiated with twofold objectives that focus on improving capture efficiency. The first objective is to determine a process for designing/selecting an efficient range hood for a given cook stove considering the International Residential Code (IRC). Parameters related to the cook stove and its surroundings will be determined and an equation will be derived. This equation will be simulated on a Monte Carlo simulation which will help us determine the right range hood for the parameters inputted. The second objective is to optimize the runtime of the range hoods with respect to the cooking activity pattern. The results will allow us to determine the best runtimes for any range hood to achieve better capture efficiency which thereby improves indoor air
Range hoods can only remove some fraction of the cooking pollutants before they blend into the kitchen air and the surroundings. In the literature, capture efficiency has been defined in different ways. It …show more content…
For them, capture efficiency equals the ratio of the captured flow rate to the total plume flow rate at the range hood. A year later Li et al [2] also argued that design methods or kitchen hood analyses that do not use the buoyancy capture principle will not produce very meaningful results. Other published experimental studies such as Farnsworth et al. [3] Singer et al. [4] and Rim et al. [5] show that capture performance increases with increase in suction flow rate and that the pollutants from the back burner are captured much more than the front burner.
The effort described in this paper was initiated with twofold objectives that focus on improving capture efficiency. The first objective is to determine a process for designing/selecting an efficient range hood for a given cook stove considering the International Residential Code (IRC). Parameters related to the cook stove and its surroundings will be determined and an equation will be derived. This equation will be simulated on a Monte Carlo simulation which will help us determine the right range hood for the parameters inputted. The second objective is to optimize the runtime of the range hoods with respect to the cooking activity pattern. The results will allow us to determine the best runtimes for any range hood to achieve better capture efficiency which thereby improves indoor air