Fluid Mechanics: Open Access

On the Modeling of Air Flow in the Tombs of the Valley of Kings

Abstract

Essam E Khalil

The tombs of the kings in Valley of the Kings, Luxor, are considered to be one of the tourism industry’s bases in Egypt due to their uniqueness all over the world. Hence, they should be preserved from the different factors that might cause harm for their wall paintings. One of these factors is the excessive relative humidity as it increases the bacteria and fungus activity inside the tomb in addition to its effect on the mechanical and physical properties of materials. This chapter describes the Research work to design ventilation systems to some of these important tombs. The chapter aims to investigate, design, and implement controlled climate to the tombs of the valley of kings with complete monitoring of air properties, temperature, relative humidity and carbon oxides and air quality parameters mechanical distributions inside selected tombs of the valley of the kings that are open for visitors. A complete climate control and monitoring of air will be effected with the aid of a mechanical ventilation system extracting air at designated locations in the wooden raised floor of the tombs. The location, size and extracted air are to be predicted and optimized the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics software (CFD). The CFD modelling techniques would solve the continuity, momentum, energy, and species transport equations in addition to k-epsilon model equations for turbulence closure. The SIMPLEC algorithm is used for the pressure-velocity coupling and a second order upwind scheme was use for discretization of the governing equations. Mesh sizes used in the present work exceeded 700,000 mesh volumes to adequately represent the flow characteristics at various locations. Throughout the first phase of this investigation, the outside air conditions, number of visitors, and airside system design effect on the tombs’ airflow characteristics will be studied in order to reach the optimum ventilation design as well as the favourable working conditions for a particular tomb. Mechanical engineering design of air flow system including under raised floor flexible duct routings, sizes, grills locations etc. with be provided in professional design drawing to be used as bases for execution and installation at the second phase. A complete set of measuring and monitoring equipment will be installed for each tomb to intelligently direct the visitors to the tomb where relative humidity and CO2 levels are permissible. A permissible number of the simultaneous of visitors for each tomb should be made in order to limit the relative humidity inside any given tomb.