Both new and existing buildings need to be adapted to climate change, in order to keep providing a comfortable and healthy indoor climate. Preferably, the adaptation measures applied at the building level scale do not require additional energy (i.e. passive measures). Previous studies showed that passive climate change adaptation measures can have a positive effect on thermal comfort in summer and its shoulder seasons in non-air-conditioned residential buildings. In this paper, the effect of these passive climate adaptation measures-applied at building component level-on the cooling and heating energy demand of a terraced house is analyzed using building energy simulations. It is shown that for this particular case the required cooling energy can be limited to a large extent (59-74%) when external solar shading or additional natural ventilation is applied. In addition, it is shown that for a well-insulated terraced house the energy cost for heating is not strongly affected by the application of passive climate change adaptation measures.
Wind tunnel experiments and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are used to analyse the flow conditions in a venturi-shaped roof, with focus on the underpressure in the narrowest roof section (contraction). This underpressure can be used to partly or completely drive the natural ventilation of the building zones. The wind tunnel experiments are performed in an atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel at scale 1:100. The 3D CFD simulations are performed with steady RANS and the RNG k-ε model. The purpose of this study is twofold:(1) to evaluate the accuracy of steady RANS and the RNG k-ε model for this application and (2) to assess the magnitude of the underpressures generated with different design configurations of the venturi-shaped roof. The CFD simulations of mean wind speed and surface pressures inside the roof are generally in good agreement (10-20%) with the wind tunnel measurements. The study shows that for the configuration without guiding vanes, large negative pressure coefficients are obtained, down to -1.35, with reference to the freestream wind speed at roof height. The comparison of design configurations with and without guiding vanes shows an -at least at first sight -counter-intuitive result: adding guiding vanes strongly decreases the absolute value of the underpressure. The reason is that the presence of the guiding vanes increases the flow resistance inside the roof and causes more wind to flow over and around the roof, and less wind through it (wind-blocking). As a result, the optimum configuration is the one without guiding vanes.
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