Solar energy air-collectors installed on the sun-oriented building facades can be used for improving natural ventilation of adjacent rooms. The basis of the physical process is an unbalanced buoyancy force arising from the temperature difference between ambient and the air inside the room. Although difficult to control due to the variability of the climatic conditions, these devices can be used as means of reducing the need for conventional energy to provide indoor air conditions within acceptable limits required by health and comfort considerations.

Air may be pre-cooled using thermal mass before it is supplied to an occupied space. One option is to pre-cool the air in a basement space and exhaust the air at high level through stacks. However, the thermal forces that determine the direction of airflow, including heat gains in the occupied space, thermal mass cooling and the external air temperature may counter each other, and result in flow reversal.

In many cases natural ventilation is used to ensure an acceptable indoor environment. However it is difficult to design a building for acceptable ventilation rates and indoor comfort without the proper tools or guidelines. The passive building simulation tool Building Toolbox was extended with natural ventilation models for the design of natural ventilated buildings. The simulation tool was verified with actual measurements during three case studies to ensure its integrity and to illustrate its applicability in this field.

The evolution of the temperature profile in a warm room driven by a natural ventilation flow which develops when the room is connected to a cold exterior by two openings at different vertical heights is explored. With the openings at the top and base of the room, we find the classical displacement ventilation regime provides a leading order description of the flow. With openings at the centre and top of the room, the ventilation is hybrid, with the lower part of the room being well-mixed, and the upper part being stratified by an upward displacement ventilation flow.

The numerical investigation of airflow and chemical transport characteristics for a general class of buildings involves identifying values for model parameters, such as effective leakage areas and temperatures, for which a fair amount of uncertainty exists. A Monte Carlo simulation, with parameter values drawn from likely distributions using Latin Hypercube sampling, helps to account for these uncertainties by generating a corresponding distribution of simulated results.

Zonal models have been proposed to bridge the gap between the whole-building macroscopic modeling methods of programs like CONTAM or COMIS and the more detailed microscopic modeling metho.ds based on solutions of the time-smoothed Navier-Stokes equations for room airflows. This paper identifies a critical shortcoming of conventional approaches to zonal modeling by introducing alternative approaches a) to formulate the key cell-to-cell flow relations upon which zonal models are based and b) to assemble the zonal system equations.

Tracer gas measurements have Jong been used to quantify the performance of ventilation systems by exploring such scales as the air exchange efficiency, the local mean age of the air, the residence time distribution and so on. The present work deals with a numerical reexamination and calibration of some relations previously derived from tracer gas analysis.

In this study the spatio-dynamic temperature response in a ventilated room to variations of the supply air temperature was modelled for a wide range of ventilation rates. The model structure was first formulated by applying standard heat transfer theory to zones of better mixing. Spatio-temporal temperature data were then exploited in statistical terms to estimate the physically meaningful model parameters. The dynamic model yielded an excellent fit to the experimental data and was found to characterise the spatially heterogeneous nature of the air flow pattern quite well.

In order to achieve a satisfactory level of hygiene and comfort in premises and to assess the pollutant transfers, it is necessary to control the air flow distribution. An intermediate approach between predictive numerical simulation and experimental determination of aerodynamic parameters characterizing air distribution in rooms, is the systemic approach. The paper presents the principles of this approach which is based on the residence times distribution (RTD) theory, commonly used in chemical engineering.