ventilative cooling

The Presentations the 44^th AIVC - 12^th TightVent - 10^th venticool  Conference "Retrofitting the Building Stock: Challenges and Opportunities for Indoor Environmental Quality", held in Dublin, Ireland on 9-10 October 2024.

Ensuring an indoor environmental quality that is acceptable to the majority of users, while also being energy efficient is a challenge. In addition, both user demands and the climate change are making it even more difficult to ensure good indoor environmental quality. One of the solutions to combat climate change is free cooling systems, such as ventilative cooling. 

Ventilative cooling is a free cooling methodology, harnessing the cooling potential of the outdoor air to remove excess heat, without the use of thermodynamic process, thereby saving valuable cooling energy in buildings. In future zero energy buildings it is essential to lower the energy consumption for cooling and here ventilative cooling is one good option.

The Book of Proceedings of the 43^rd AIVC - 11^th TightVent - 9^th venticool Conference: "Ventilation, IEQ and health in sustainable buildings" held in Copenhagen, Denmark on 4-5 October 2023.

The Presentations at the 43^rd AIVC - 11^th TightVent - 9^th venticool Conference: "Ventilation, IEQ and health in sustainable buildings" held in Copenhagen, Denmark on 4-5 October 2023.

Buildings account for 40% of EU energy consumption and 36% of the energy related greenhouse gas emissions at present. Consequently, the net zero target set by Energy Performance of Building’s Directive by 2050 for building stock is ambitious to achieve. The often default design choice to adopt mechanical cooling in non-domestic buildings highlights the lack of robust decision support tools or frameworks available to designers to properly evaluate ventilative cooling as a realistic alternative.

As a result of the new initiatives and regulations towards nearly zero energy buildings, designers are more frequently exploiting the cooling potential of the climate to reduce overheating and improve indoor well-being of people. At early stage of design, climate analysis is particularly useful for determining the most cost-effective passive cooling methods, such as ventilative cooling. However, besides the external climate conditions, building energy uses are characterized by occupancy pattern and needs, envelope characteristics and internal loads.