single-sided ventilation

This paper investigates the impact of ventilative cooling in residential buildings constructed from light-weight cross-laminated timber. Different temperature-controlled ventilative cooling concepts such as single sided ventilation, cross-ventilation and thermal stack based chimney ventilation concepts are simulated and compared in terms of impact on indoor temperature and robustness to external conditions such as the surroundings and the building orientation.

Even in Northern European climates, overheating in many Nearly Zero Energy Buildings is a barrier to year round occupant satisfaction with the indoor thermal environment. Improved energy performance and enhanced thermal comfort should not be perceived as a rigid dichotomy of concepts. However, an acceptable thermal environment, during extended cooling periods now present in NZEB’s, can come at a high energy cost if mechanical cooling is used.

Previous studies on single-sided natural ventilation are mostly limited to very simple physical models, such as a single-room or single-storey building. Our recent on-site measurements have shown that previous empirical models based on such simple physical models are inapplicable to multi-storey buildings. In order to explore why, this study systematically compares the ventilation characteristics of single-storey and multi-storey buildings with single-sided natural ventilation.

The aim was to develop a simple dynamic model for predicting air exchange caused by short time single-sided ventilation and necessary window opening time in classrooms. Tracer gas measurements have been made in a full-scale room. The comparison indicates that the model can be used when rough estimates of air exchange are of interest.