Solar chimneys for residential ventilation

An increasing impact of ventilation and air-conditioning to the total energy consumption of buildings has drawn attention to natural ventilation and passive cooling. The very common way of natural ventilation in residential buildings is passive stack ventilation. The passive stack ventilation relies on the stack effect created by the temperature difference between air temperature inside and outside a building. A solar chimney represents an option how to improve the performance of passive stack ventilation on hot sunny days, when there is a small difference between indoor and outdoor air temperature. The full-scale solar chimneys have been built and tested at the Department of Thermodynamics and Environmental Engineering at the Brno University of Technology. The main goal of the experiments is to investigate performance of solar chimneys under the climatic conditions of the Czech Republic. Two different constructions of a solar chimney have been tested; a light weight construction and the construction with thermal mass.