Ventilated courtyard as a passive cooling strategy in the hot desert climate

Traditional architecture gives ideas to enrich modern architecture. In traditional architecture, local materials and renewable energy resources have been used. The courtyard was one of the traditional architecture solutions as a climate modifier. The inclusion of an internal courtyard in buildings design is attributed to the optimization of natural ventilation in order to minimize indoor overheating conditions.
The paper investigates the potential of a ventilated courtyard for passive cooling in a small building in a hot desert climate. The analyzed model is one of the low-income housing models in New Aswan City - Egypt. Which was built and provided with main services by the government, these housing models were characterized by their improper design in many cases, especially, concerning with climatic design.
To evaluate the performance of a ventilated courtyard, building simulation software TRNSYS 16 (The coupling between TRNSYS and COMIS) was used. The courtyard parameters considered were the courtyard orientation and the courtyard geometry. To evaluate the performance of a ventilated courtyard, the average monthly indoor air temperature for the purposed building determined in the overheating summer season depended on the weather data for the building site. The results of the investigations of the courtyard parameters indicate that there are some important parameters and other are of less significance which affect the thermal performance of the courtyard building model.