Multizone Air Flow and Pollutant Simulation
COMIS (Conjunction of Multizone Infiltration Specialists) is a multizone airflow simulation program.
Many modules are embedded into COMIS, from air flow components such as cracks, test data components, windows, doors, vertical apertures (2-way flow), ducts and duct fittings, fans, flow controllers to pollutant sources and occupants, plus the possibility of defining schedules attached to most of the components (e.g. closing and opening of windows in relation to inhabitant behavior). Thermostatic flow devices (flow resistance depending on the air flow temperature) can also be modeled. All these modules allow for various applications such as sizing of mechanical ventilation systems, effects of retrofitting measures on ventilation efficiency of buildings, transport of contaminants (between zones, but also from outside), ventilation effectiveness, pollutant removal efficiency, age of air, smoke propagation, assessment of ventilation heat losses, passive cooling, assessment of heat transport between zones.
COMIS can be used with Simulation Studio, the powerful and convenient simulation environment of TRNSYS. The two programs can be coupled via this environment, thus allowing for coupled thermal and air flow studies.
COMIS (Conjunction Of Multizone Infiltration Specialists) was developed in 1988-89 by ten scientists from nine countries, during a twelve-month workshop hosted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). It is based on the result of the International Energy Agencies (IEA) Annex 23. Annex 23 was supported between 1990 and 1996 by nine participating nations: Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and USA. Its objectives were to study the physical phenomena causing air flow and pollutant transport in multizone buildings, develop numerical modules to be integrated in the COMIS multi zone air flow modeling system, and evaluate the COMIS code. Annex 23 was dissolved at the end of 1997. The official COMIS code was handed over to the Swiss agency EMPA in 1998, and recent versions (up to COMIS 3.2) have been developed in collaboration between EMPA and CSTB. It was released as an open source project in 2011.
The program is licensed under the LGPL version 3 (or greater).
This version has been slightly modified from the original version to compile with the free gfortran compiler. The files have been renamed to be all lower case. There are a number of compiler-specific files:
- comv-cca.for: write console progress lines with CVF
- comv-cqw.for: write progress lines in a window with CVF QuickWin
- comv-win.for: command line parser for use with DVF
and there is one TRNSYS-related file:
- comv-trn.for: TYPE157 subroutine
These files are kept but are not compiled. The command line parser in comv-unx.for seems to be compatible with gfortran, so that one is used. A (hopefully) fairly standard Makefile is included as well as the start of a true CMake-based build.