Office night ventilation pre-design tool.

NiteCool was developed under the Energy Related Environmental Issues in Buildings(EnREI) DOE Programme and is designed especially for the assessment of a range of nightcooling ventilation strategies. The program is based on a single zone ventilation model and isconfigured to analyse a 10m x 6m x3m cell of an office building. It is intended to be used atthe early stages in the design process to help the designer to make informed decisions on theconstruction, opening configuration and operation of the building. The user input is restrictedto a few parameters fiom which a weekly intemal temperature profile is predicted togetherwith the energy consumption and the peak cooling capacity requirement relative to a referencesystem (with no night cooling). In this way, various building and system designs can beinvestigated by manually adjusting parameters until the comfortlenergy consumption designcriteria are met. The program can also be used to calculate the size of openings required toachieve a certain flow rate under given design conditions. This is a very quick and easy wayto investigate the feasibility of using natural ventilation to improve comfort levels inbuildings.