A STUDY OF NATURAL VENTILATION OF COURT YARD BUILDING USING COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS SIMULATIONS

Abstract

Growing public awareness and tendency to promote energy saving has spurred a lot of studies to introduce passive approach in the usage of natural ventilation instead of air conditioning to control the indoor environment of buildings. It is now necessary than before to study the influence of the environmental conditions around the building on internal environment of the building. This dissertation makes an attempt to discuss the natural ventilation characteristics of courtyard building by using Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations. Different design parameters have been considered such as block dimension, roof types, shutter opening sizes and locations, angle of window openings etc. From the comparative analysis of the simulation results including air velocity, its distribution and the main airflow path, some research data is obtained, the data can be used as the basic environmental considerations for designing natural ventilation in the multi-storey courtyard building. In this study, 2-D simulation is used to study the potential of individual building elements such as window opening, roof and building dimension. Further study by using of 3-D CFD simulation is expected for a more accurate prediction of natural ventilation in a fully developed model.