In the industrial workrooms and laboratories, indoor air
quality (IAQ) control must comply with a double request:
to provide healthy working conditions and to protect, from
damages, the industrial products. In order to satisfy these
requirements, important design instructions and guidelines
are de3ned [1]. In this direction, particular attention is paid
to the air ventilation, widely used to contain the airborne
contaminants concentrations to su>ciently low levels. The
local exhaust ventilation (LEV) systems [2] achieve this
aim by generating, towards the exhaust opening, an air&ow
3eld that removes the airborne contaminants decreasing their
spreading over the workplace air.
The Navier–Stokes equations describing the air&ow 3eld
induced by an exhaust opening [3] are complex and exact
analytical solutions are provided only in very simple
cases. Hence, the classic design practices for LEV systems
are mainly based on empirical relationships that do not provide
deeper insight into the underlying physical phenomena.
Despite this limitation, the experimental analyses today are
still an e7ective tool in the LEV systems investigation [4,5]