Most modern office blocks in Southern Africa are air conditioned, for obvious reasons, but some developers are eager to find ways of reducing the capital cost of these projects. Fred Smith of Ove Arup Partnership reports on one· particularly innovative project in Zimbabwe where passive cooling ·met the brief.
This paper deals with the relationship between the characteristics of ventilation and the architectural features on three types of Japanese houses representative of the recent historical evolution in the building of dwellings: a traditional well ventilated house in a rural area, a typical postwar house with a central corridor and a multi-family house of high air-tightness in an urban area. The investigations were carried out based on 3-D numerical air flow simulations with realistic wind conditions.
Are air conditioned buildings better at filtering out external pollutants than their naturally ventilated cousins? A recent field study carried out by researchers at the BRE has yielded some surprising results.
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