Simulation techniques for designing passive cooling of historical buildings.

This research is based upon an examination of the natural cooling of the large reading room of the Bernardini(tm) Library in Lecce, Italy. The library is contained in an old building which is currently under restoration. Both indoor and outdoor temperatures as well as relative humidity were monitored, so that the most appropriate system to cool the library's large reading room in summer could be selected. The external walls were endoscopically investigated. Air is supplied by a displacement ventilation system and a system of buried pipes has been designed. The most significant Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are used both to evaluate the system's operation with more realistic boundary conditions, and to make a very accurate design of the system.