Practical natural ventilation performance metric based on thermal autonomy for sustainable building design

Abstract

Natural ventilation is an essential component in sustainable building design. However, successfully incorporating it remains difficult because the utilizable amounts of ambient energy resources differ according to project conditions such as ambient climates. Moreover, lack of a metric that could encourage an architect to design a proper plan and façade for natural ventilation at the schematic design stage is being recognized as a barrier to successful achievement of natural ventilation. An inappropriate plan and façade would make it impossible to make thorough considerations for successful implementation of natural ventilation at the later design stages. To encourage even the architects without special expertise in natural ventilation, the metric should be as simple as possible to evaluate the achieved natural ventilation design intuitively and rationally. This paper proposes net Thermal Autonomy as a modified metric of Thermal Autonomy, which cannot easily evaluate the achievement level because the applied weather data significantly influence the calculated value. In the proposed metric, a universal threshold covering climate factors is available by applying net time, while the outdoor condition suitable for natural ventilation is used in the denominator. The practicality of the proposed metric is examined through parametric building energy simulations and analyses.