Effects of different internal designs of traditional wind towers on their thermal behavior

Analysis of traditional windcatchers and the effects produced by changing the size, shape, and position of the outlet opening

“…For the numerical simulation phase of the work, ANSYS Fluent was chosen as the tool to simulate the flow fields and this has been used by many researchers [14,19,20,[34][35][36].…”

“…In preliminary tests, the same models used in different publications were tested. Various configurations of the k-ε turbulence model were used as in the work of Hosseinnia [19], Calautit [37], Heidari [35], and different configurations of the k-ω model were tested following the work of Dehghani [14], Hosseini [20], and Per´en [36]. To widen the search the k-kl-ω model was also used, even when this model is not often used in this type of flow.…”

“…A considerable body of work has been published on the operation and capacity of the different types of windcatchers to increase natural ventilation in buildings. Research that studies the functioning of the traditional windcatchers covers: (a) monitoring in buildings with windcatchers [7][8][9], (b) experiments with scale models in wind tunnels [10][11][12][13][14], supplemented with CFD, and (c) studies with CFD [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] at full size, generally made using commercial codes. The functioning of windcatchers is so convenient that many modern architectural designs seek their utilization.…”

“…tested different geometric configurations of the inlets and showed that making improvements to the catcher can improve airflow inside the buildings. In a similar spirit [19], studied the effect that using different internal designs has over the overall performance when windcatchers are used in combinations with evaporative cooling techniques. Regarding the outlet opening that is the main focus of the present work [22], presents a very extensive research of different outlet configurations combining windows in the rooms, different locations for the catchers on the roofs of the buildings, among many other, documenting the resulting air quality over the several design iterations for buildings.…”

Louver and window position effect on cross-ventilation in a generic isolated building: A CFD approach

“…22,24 A literature review indicates that one of the commonly used approaches in CFD simulations of windcatchers is 3D steady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS). 9,10,17,[26][27][28][29][30][31] The standard k-ε turbulence model has been widely used. 9,10,[26][27][28][29][30] However, Montazeri and Montazeri 17 reported that realizable k-ε performs better results for cross-ventilation of wind-catchers.…”