Assessment of Natural Ventilation Techniques by Means of Measurements and Retrospective CFD Simulation on a Test Building

Abstract

The study described here analyzed natural ventilation techniques, operated in a real building in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to assist passive cooling. The assessment has been conducted by comparing digital simulation results and field measurements. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to retrospectively understand and quantify the monitored contribution of natural ventilation toward cooling the building. After calibrating the model with the field monitored data, the CFD simulations showed that the predicted ventilation strategies (buoyancy and stack effect to remove indoor heat; “wind catcher” effect to provide indoor passive cooling) contribute to lower the indoor temperature by an average of 0.7°C throughout the day. The outcomes of the study contributes to assist early stage design, with special regard to passive cooling via natural ventilation, to achieve more sustainable buildings. Nevertheless, while it is quite reliable to plan for main air flow and direction, in a real building alternative behavior might occur that is difficult to control and might affect the ventilation purpose and efficiency.