Increasing Ventilation by Passive Strategies: Analysis of Indoor Air Circulation Changes through the Utilization of Microclimate Elements

Abstract

A demand for renewable alternatives that would be able to deal with the problems related to well-being is directly linked to the world's growing needs to save energy and reduce environmental costs. For a project implementation addressing these issues, it is essential to know the climatic conditions of the target area. Taking natural ventilation, climatic factors, and renewable alternatives as important sources of comfort, in this work, passive strategies, through the utilization of microclimate elements as well as the location of outside obstacles, were imposed on an initial and specific project. The objective was to introduce obstacles which could interfere in the field of external wind and evaluate whether this outside intervention is able to make changes in indoor air circulation. The wind fields for the studied cases were obtained by computational simulations, and their consequences were analyzed to attain thermal comfort. The method adopted to obtain the wind fields was a Petrov-Galerkin type method, which is a stabilized mixed finite element method of the Navier-Stokes equations considering the incompressibility and formulated in primitive variables, velocity and pressure. The obtained results point to the solutions that promote the increase or decrease of the wind-field intensity.

Modeling and Validation of the Cool Summer Microclimate Formed by Passive Cooling Elements in a Semi-Outdoor Building Space

“…There has also been intensive research into numerical simulations to evaluate the effects of outdoor Sustainability 2020, 12, 5360 3 of 23 microclimates on the indoor environment as passive cooling techniques [28]. This includes evaluation of the effects of the outdoor radiation environment on the solar heat gain of buildings [29,30], the outdoor wind environment on the natural ventilation of buildings [2,3,5], the outdoor microclimate on building thermal performance [31][32][33] and energy demands [34][35][36][37][38][39][40], and outdoor overheating, including urban heat islands, on the energy demand of buildings [41,42]. In particular, vegetation models have been applied to numerical simulations to evaluate solar shading [43][44][45][46], wind break [47], and overall cooling effects [48,49] derived from vegetation on the indoor thermal environment.…”

“…Building microclimates have a strong influence on the effectiveness of natural ventilation [1][2][3][4][5]. In the hot humid summer climate of Tokyo, a combination of factors such as reduced green spaces and increasingly compact house design in urban and suburban areas has made it difficult to maintain a comfortable indoor environment using only passive cooling methods such as natural ventilation and solar shading.…”

Courtyard as Passive Design Solution for School Buildings in Hot Area

“…The traditional concepts for design become the core of the vernacular and sustainable architecture, most of these concepts known as passive design strategies [2]. These strategies are integrated in the buildings design to improve the indoor thermal circumstances with less energy consumption [3]. Rajapaksha, Nagai and Okumiya highlighted the courtyard as important component among the passive design solutions in the humid warm areas [4].…”