openings

In the UK the increased use of natural ventilation in buildings is being encouraged, particularly during hot weather as an alternative to air conditioning or mechanical ventilation. In order to take advantage of this option building designers need to be able to estimate potential air flows. Conventional calculation methods assume windows to be simple openings, however in practice the situation is more complex since during hot weather the opening is likely to be shielded by some form of solar shading device.

The airflow between a warm room and cool exterior can be significantly affected by an external headwind. Pollutant concentrations within the space depend on the relative sizes of the wind and the undisturbed stack driven flow. Two scenarios are described. Firstly, a space is filled initially with buoyant polluted air. The space is then naturally ventilated through a single opening. In the "no wind" case, a gravity current of external air flows into the space. All the polluted air is expelled from the room.

In order to evaluate the accuracy of COMIS predictions for large openings,and to study its sensitivity, two tests have been performed. In the first test, COMIS is used together with four existing multizone air flow models to calculate natural ventilation in a building for various climatic and opening configurations. In the second test, COMIS predictions are compared with single-sided ventilation measurements taken in test cells. The results of the tests are reported.

The work was concerned with measuring natural convection through a large horizontal opening between two rooms in a building. Airflow rates between the two rooms were measured using a tracer-gas decay technique. Room 1 was heated to various temperatures in the range l8°C to 33°C using thermostatically-controlled heaters. Room 2 was unheated. A multi-point sampling unit was used to collect tracer-gas samples from each room. The concentration of SF6 tracer was measured using an infra-red gas analyser.

The effect of airflow through an opening (or a crack) on the natural convection in a stairwell model is presented. The flow is driven by energy input from an electric panel heater located in the lower floor of the stairwell. The work concentrates on the effect of the size of inlet opening by varying it while keeping the area of the outlet constant. New data are presented for the measured temperatures and velocities at various cross-sections of the stairwell.

This paper presents the results of full-scale experiments in a realistic building to evaluate natural convective heat and mass transfer through doorway-like apertures under small temperature differentials. The zone-to-zone temperature differences were nominally between re and 2.5°C. Heat transfer correlations, coefficient of discharge, and thermal stratification are reported for air (Pr = 0. 71), an enclosure aspect ratio of 0.26, aperture height relative to the enclosure height in the range of 0. 75 to l, and aperture width relative to the enclosure width in the range 0.29 to 0. 79.