Mixed-mode ventilative cooling opportunity for an existing shopping mall retrofit

Shopping centres currently design has included a small portion of automated windows sized for smoke ventilation. Their presence is mandatory for fire regulation and they are usually operated just in case of fire. Nevertheless, these buildings can potentially take advantage of those openable windows to exploit the potential of natural ventilation to guarantee the minimum air change rate required by IAQ standards and for ventilative cooling purpose reducing cooling and electrical consumption.

Treating the cause - not the symptoms.

Finding a solution to the problem of draughty buildings can be fraught with difficulty. Very often only the symptoms are apparent and the root cause can be difficult to identify. All too often a 'try and see' approach is adopted until finally, if luck prevails, a successful solution is found. The design team addressing the problem of a draughty mall at a shopping centre in Shrewsbury adopted a different approach. The possible causes were identified using site knowledge and Computational Fluid Dynamics. A 'blind' analysis of site data was then undertaken by an independent statistician ie.