Copyright © 2013 Qing-He Yao and Qing-Yong Zhu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The motions of the airflow induced by the movement of an automatic guided vehicle (AGV) in a cleanroom are numerically studied by large-scale simulation. For this purpose, numerical experiments scheme based on domain decomposition method is designed. Compared with the related past research, the high Reynolds number is treated by large-scale computation in this work. A domain decomposition Lagrange-Galerkin method is employed to approximate the Navier-Stokes equations and the convection diffusion equation; the stiffness matrix is symmetric and an incomplete balancing preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method is employed to solve the linear algebra system iteratively. The end wall effects are readily viewed, and the necessity of the extension to 3 dimensions is confirmed. The effect of the high efficiency particular air (HEPA) filter on contamination control is studied and the proper setting of the speed of the clean air flow is also investigated. More details of the recirculation zones are revealed by the 3D large-scale simulation.