Passive cooling - State of the art

This paper summarizes the results of an horizontal study on Passive and Hybrid Cooling for buildings, carried out by the authors, on behalf of the EEC Research Program "Building 2000" /1/. The state of the art of the strategies for the prevention of thermal gain is presented. Also the existing situation on the design tools and the computational methods regarding the Passive and Hybrid cooling techniques and components is analysed. Finally the data of several designed and constructed buildings in Europe using Passive and Hybrid cooling techniques and components are given and analysed.