single sided ventilation

Throughout history, natural ventilation has remained the preferred choice for the majority of residential buildings, while, in commercial buildings, natural ventilation went from being the single option to somewhat of a lost art as mechanical ventilation systems and air conditioning became the standard during the second half of the twentieth century. Recently, as a result of environmental concerns, in particular the greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, interest in natural ventilation in commercial buildings has seen a resurgence.

Adopting natural ventilation as a retrofit strategy for cooling, due to the low impact nature of the installation, is attractive due to the cooling potential of untreated outdoor air for large periods of the extended cooling season, particularly in northern climates. In line with this it is important to characterise the performance of natural ventilation components in low energy buildings in successfully transferring the cooling potential of outdoor air to the occupied zone.

Non-invasive, scalable, building retrofit solutions are amongst the most likely large scale adoption techniques to assist in climate change adaptation in the existing built environment, particularly in university type buildings where rehousing live activities will prove costly. Natural ventilation is an attractive retrofit strategy due to the low impact nature of the installation. A number of internal environmental criteria that are important to ventilative cooling strategies can be substantially modified as a result of an external retrofit solution.

Natural ventilation can be an effective measure to minimize building energy consumption and to improve indoor air quality. This study focuses specifically on buoyancy-driven single-sided ventilation design using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. Simulations are performed for a student dormitory under typical conditions of outdoor temperature, cooling load, and opening size by use of an indoor stack model and a combined indoor and outdoor stack model. The simulation results are also compared with semi-analytical solutions.

The present paper refers to the numerical prediction of air velocities and temperatures inside single-sided naturally ventilated buildings and more specifically the special case in which air from the external environment is brought into the building through single-directed openings. The work is focused on the physical procedures governing air movement during the single-sided natural ventilation.