Atlas of natural cooling techniques in southern Europe: application to evaporative cooling systems.

This study is a contribution to European projects Pascool/Joule II and Altener/Sink that deal with the usability of passive cooling systems in Europe. The first phase of this work was to define design methodology in order to evaluate natural cooling potential according to the climatic quantification criteria of the site, the cooling needs of the building, the cooling system performances, and comfort criteria defined by the couple of temperature and relative humidity set points. Numerical simulations have been performed in the second step in order to calculate the Theoretical Evaporative Potential Index, the Net Evaporative Potential Index, the Cooling Need Index and the Natural Cooling Saving Factor. These parameters have been evaluated for different types of evaporative cooling systems (direct and indirect), for different sites in southern Europe, and for various temperature and relative humidity set points. A design methodology of the natural cooling potential which was developed in order to build southern European atlas will be presented in this paper. This atlas locates the applicability zone of the passive cooling techniques and would provide, for building designers, decision making tools during the first steps of building design.