An Overview of Unsteady Analysis Techniques for Natural Wind Turbulence and its Effects on Natural Ventilation

Focusing on the turbulence in natural ventilation and its impact on both occupant thermal comfort and building energy consumption, this paper presents a review of existing unsteady natural ventilation envelope flow models, as well as other techniques that have potential application to further our understanding of turbulence in natural ventilation and develop models which capture the dynamics and effects on thermal comfort. Literature provides numerous techniques ranging from quasi-steady temporal inertial theory, to unsteady CFD models, to experimental study, and other statistical and signal processing techniques. The Proper Orthogonal Decomposition and Stochastic Estimate techniques have been paid particular attention as they may be an alternative tool for understanding the turbulence of natural wind and possibly be combined with predictive models in an attempt to quantify the effects on thermal comfort and/or optimization of building energy management system’s operation.