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Ventilative cooling (VC) is an application (distribution in time and space) of air flow rates to reduce cooling loads in spaces using outside air driven by natural, mechanical or hybrid ventilation strategies. VC reduces overheating in both existing and new buildings - being both a sustainable and energy efficient solution to improve indoor thermal comfort. VC is promising low energy cooling technology that has potential to substantially reduce the use of mechanical cooling in airtight and highly insulated buildings. However, architects and engineers are skeptic to apply natural VC in their building design due to the uncertainty in the prediction of energy performance and thermal comfort.
Firstly, BSim software, that is a whole building simulation tool, is validated according to procedure proposed in EN 15255 standard (Thermal performance of buildings – Sensible room cooling load calculation – General criteria and validation procedures). The aim of validation according to standard is to control if BSim modules provide reliable results and would not cause the discrepancy between measured and simulated operative temperature.
Secondly, simulated operative temperatures for five different ventilation system configurations are compared to on-site building measurements of a single sided ventilated office room.
Paper shows that simulation model is capable of estimating the operative temperature during a summer period reasonably accurate. The maximum obtained deviation of the simulated operative temperature for five different system configurations, is within -19% and 5.1%.
Moreover, out of 13 selected validation cases proposed in EN 15255, 11 have passed and 2 have not pass the validation procedure. The paper provides explanation for the 2 cases that did not pass the validation procedure and share the conclusions drawn from validation procedure.