Distribution of indoor thoron in dwellings under normal and turbulent flow conditions using CFD simulation technique

Abstract

Extensive work has been carried out on measurement of radon and thoron levels in indoor environment in last three decades. These studies are important from radiation protection point of view, if one considered the contribution of radon, thoron and their decay products to total inhalation dose. Numerous studies on radon measurement well established the behaviour of its dispersion in dwellings. But the short lives of thoron cause the difficulty to understand the distribution of thoron in dwellings. The problem becomes more complicated when thoron dispersion is studied under different inlet air flow rate. Different air flow pattern may cause different thoron level at different point in test dwellings causing uncertainty in the measurements. This work utilized the CFD simulation technique for study of indoor thoron dispersion in test dwellings under normal and turbulent flow of air. The simulation study for thoron distribution in a test room was performed for air velocities 0.10 ms-1, 0.25 ms-1, 0.50 ms-1, 1.0 ms-1, 1.5 ms-1, and 2.0 ms-1. The results show that the thoron distribution becomes uniform for the inlet velocity more than 0.5 ms-1 and appropriate to measure indoor thoron concentration. While in normal condition the measured thoron level varies depending upon the location of dosimeter. Thoron diffusion and migration length are also increased with air flow rate.

Keywords

• indoor thoron
• thoron diffusion length
• indoor air distribution
• computational fluid dynamics