On a novel approach to control natural and mechanical night ventilation

The aim of the present work is to improve night venti-lation control strategies, specially for the mid-season periods where an unadapted control scheme can re-sult in undesirable heat loads. We present a method based on developing an adaptive algorithm suitable for different types of buildings having different thermal masses. The algorithm, mainly based on the history of outside and inside temperatures, is characterized by a set of parameters that we attempt to identify: a coef-ficient related to building time constant and a couple of fixed set-point temperatures. Results show that the adaptive algorithm was able to adapt to the mid-season period, thus preventing unwanted heat loads while pre-serving remarkable thermal comfort conditions.