Towards an alternative cooling: Optimisation of the successive use of the cooling systems from passive to active - Development of design and control strategies of the hybrid cooling

Due to global warming, severe problems of buildings overheating during summer in temperate and hot climates arise. Thus, there is an increasing use of air conditioning. However, alternative passive and soft cooling systems exist to address comfort and energy savings issues, such as natural ventilation or ceiling fans, that consume less energy. Although they are well-known today, their use remains under-enhanced. CoolDown project, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), aims to define the tools and methodology to optimise the successive use of passive, soft and active systems to maximise comfort for occupants while minimising energy consumption in summer, hot seasons or heat waves. The methodology of this project is hereafter presented to achieve two mainly two types of outputs: (1) the definition of metrics to quantify the building potential and performance from thermal comfort and energy perspectives, and (2) the development of tools and algorithms to optimise the coupling of building passive and active cooling systems, both in the design and operation phases.