Effect of thermal mass on the airflow and ventilation in passive building design.

Air may be pre-cooled using thermal mass before it is supplied to an occupied space. One option is to pre-cool the air in a basement space and exhaust the air at high level through stacks. However, the thermal forces that determine the direction of airflow, including heat gains in the occupied space, thermal mass cooling and the external air temperature may counter each other, and result in flow reversal. This paper uses a combination of thermal dynamic and computational fluid dynamics (CFO) airflow modelling to study the ventilation and thermal performance of a hypothetical naturally ventilated 'mass cooled' auditorium.