Particle dispersion and removal associated with kitchen range hood and whole house ventilation system

The objective of this study is to evaluate how the removal and dispersion of the cooking-generated particles in a residential unit vary with ventilation strategies. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed to evaluate the particle removal and dispersion performance of six ventilation strategies with three make-up air supply scenarios and two kitchen range hood designs. The results showed that the particle capture efficiency ranged from 0.58 to 1.00 for 2.5 μm particles, and from 0.62 to 0.96 for 10 μm particles depending on the ventilation strategies. The peak particle number concentration of the breathing zone in the kitchen was the lowest when supplying the make-up air from the whole house ventilation system, which was only 0.07% of the peak concentration with supplying natural make-up air through a kitchen window. When using the make-up air from the whole house ventilation system, 1-h integrated exposure was decreased by 92.1% for the kitchen, 89.4% for the living room, and 98.7% for the bedroom, compared to the natural make-up air supply scenario. The results reveal that supplying make-up air from the living room and bedrooms while operating a typical range hood yields the largest particle removal, suggesting effective control of residential exposure to cooking-generated particles.