Method for Evaluating an Air-Conditioning System with Natural Ventilation by Coupled Analysis of a Building Energy Simulation Tool and Computational Fluid Dynamics

In office buildings, an air-conditioning system with natural ventilation can reduce cooling loads and create a comfortable indoor environment. However, it is difficult to predict the performance of such systems and there is concern that the natural ventilation will create an uneven indoor thermal environment. In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating the performance of a natural-ventilation air-conditioning system by coupling a building energy simulation tool and computational fluid dynamics. In addition, we analysed the office building in which the system was installed and verified the prediction accuracy of the proposed method by comparing the simulation results with actual measurements. It was confirmed that the proposed method has sufficient accuracy.