Evaluating natural ventilation cooling potentials during early building designs

Natural ventilation (NV) is an efficient way of cooling buildings, and its energy saving potentials however depend on many parameters including local hourly weather and climate conditions, types of ventilations, indoor cooling loads (or heat gains), operating schedules, window types, and opening-wall ratios etc. Determination of the NV flow rate is thus challenging, although there are many empirical equations for different NV strategies, e.g. single-sided and cross-ventilation, considering different driving forces, e.g. wind, buoyancy and a mix of both.