page_title: Revolving door
section_title: Research
hierarchical_section_title: Revolving door / Research
caption_attribution_description: Revolving door sign in Syracuse, New York
context_page_description: A revolving door typically consists of three or four doors that hang on a central shaft and rotate around a vertical axis within a cylindrical enclosure. Revolving doors are energy efficient as they prevent drafts, thus decreasing the loss of heating or cooling for the building. Revolving doors were designed to relieve stack effect pressure in buildings. High-rise buildings experience immense pressure caused by air rushing through the building, referred to as 'Stack Effect' pressure. At the same time, revolving doors allow large numbers of people to pass in and out.
context_section_description: Research into the air and energy exchanges associated with revolving door usage have been carried out on a few occasions. The earliest such study was carried out in 1936 by A. M. Simpson, who worked for the van Kannel revolving door company at the time. Simpson's study was followed by a study by Schutrum et al. in 1961, and more recently a study by van Schijndel et al. in 2003. These studies have focused on providing detailed measurements of the quantities of air and heat transferred inside the compartments of a door as it revolves. With the exception of the study by van Schijndel et al., which was purely theoretical, the measurements carried out for the other studies were used to provide design charts enabling engineers to estimate the quantity of air transferred by a door in function of the revolution rate and temperature contrast. Unfortunately, none of these studies appear to be referenced by existing design codes.
  Although the aforementioned studies provide useful results, these results are also specific to the type of door which they were acquired for, namely 2m x 2m doors with four compartments. Although it appears that these dimensions were standard for four-compartment doors at the time, this is not the case nowadays. A more recent experimental study carried out at Imperial College London's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has provided more insight into the flow physics by which air is transferred across a revolving door.
  Airflows and energy losses through revolving doors also occur as a result of leakages past the seals of the door. Leakages are common to any type of opening in an otherwise closed space, but have been investigated in the context of revolving doors by Zmeureanu et al. and by Schutrum et al. before that. The first study concluded that to avoid significant leakages, the seals of the doors should be maintained and periodically replaced if needed. The second study produced design charts for estimating the leakage rate through a revolving door. Unlike the curves for estimating the transfer rate also published in this study, the curves for estimating the leakage rate are more generic. As such these design curves still form the basis of the target leakage rates for revolving doors recommended by the ASHRAE standard 90.1 in the US.  On May 25, 2006, an MIT Study entitled "Modifying Habits Towards Sustainability: A Study of Revolving Doors Usage on the MIT Campus" was published.  In it, B. A. Cullum, Olivia Lee, Sittha Sukkasi and Dan Wesolowski concluded, "...substantial energy is saved when people use the revolving doors instead of swing doors - the smallest of habit changes contributes to energy conservation... Modification of one habit... indeed has the ability to eventually impact the environment on a global scale."
  While preferred by building owners for energy conservation, revolving doors may be avoided by some people due to the perceived greater physical effort in using them.
caption: Revolving doors are favored because they can be used as an airlock to minimize a building's heating and air conditioning losses.
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