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Article history: This paper aims to validate and improve three cross and single-sided natural ventilation models imple-
Received 18 November 2012 mented in a whole-building hygrothermal and energy simulation program. The tested models are the
Received in revised form 17 February 2013 British Standard for cross ventilation, the de Gids and Phaff’s and Larsen’s for single-sided ventilation.
Accepted 20 February 2013
Airflow rates obtained by those models have been compared to the measurements performed in two
full-scale buildings: one single room house located in a wind tunnel facility and one real three-storey
Keywords:
building. Results show a large variation of airflow rates provided by the different models. The Larsen’s
Single-sided natural ventilation
model can be improved if coupled to the CPCALC algorithm, providing better results for both wind tunnel
Wind tunnel
Building simulation
and on-site experiments.
Airflow © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
0378-7788/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2013.02.055
R.Z. Freire et al. / Energy and Buildings 62 (2013) 222–229 223
Table 1
Constants C1 , C2 and C3 [22].
where A is the opening area (in m2 ), h is the opening height (in m),
U(10) is the meteorological station reference velocity at 10 m high
(m/s) and T is the mean temperature difference between inside
and outside (K). Fig. 2. Variation of surface-averaged wall pressure coefficients for low-rise build-
The coefficients of this model account for wind (dimensionless ings [26].
3.2. Larsen (2006) The pressure created by the wind on the building is described
by Eq. (10). It is calculated by multiplying a dimensionless pressure
As a result of experiments performed in 2006, Larsen proposed a coefficient CP by the dynamic pressure.
new model [9] to describe the airflow for a single-sided ventilation 1
case, which is presented in Eq. (7). Pwind = CP e U(z)2 (10)
2
where U(z) is calculated by Eq. (4). The CP coefficient is a function of
CP,opening T
QV = A C1 f (ˇ) CP U(z = BH)2 + C2 hT + C3
2 the shape of the building, the wind direction and the surrounding
2
U(z = BH) terrain. In what follows, two models to calculate the distribution
(7) of CP are presented. The first one considers a unique value for the
whole surface whereas the second one calculates the CP value at
where CP is the pressure coefficient which can be calculated by any any location on the surface.
of the methods presented in the third section of this paper, U(z = BH)
is the wind velocity at the building height, h is the opening height 4.1. Mean CP calculation
(m). The dimensionless coefficient depending on the wind effect
C1 , the buoyancy constant C2 , and the turbulence constant C3 are According to the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and
defined in Table 1. If U(z) tends to zero, C2 is the only term to be Air Conditioning Engineers [23], the distribution of CP on a low-rise
considered, assuring the consistency of the equation. building associated to the variation of the incidence angle can be
In Eq. (7) CP,opening and f(ˇ) are calculated from: estimated through the curve presented in Fig. 2. Deru and Burns
[24] showed that there are several correlations for the wind pres-
CP,opening = 9.1894−9 ˇ3 − 2.62610−6 ˇ2 − 0.0002354ˇ + 0.113
sure coefficient derived from wind tunnel experimental data in
(8) order of increasing complexity and accuracy, as those proposed
by Walton [25], Swami and Chandra [26] and the COMIS group
[27]. These correlations are potentially inaccurate in situations
that introduce high turbulence intensity to the airflow, e.g. high
f (ˇ) = −3.284312 × 10−9 ˇ4 + 2.363134 × 10−6 ˇ3 terrain roughness or local shielding, irregular shaped buildings
− 5.24549 × 10−4 ˇ2 +3.581077 × 10−2 ˇ+0.3017574 (9) (nonrectangular or rectangular with aspect ratios far from a cube)
or buildings with overhangs or fins. The model developed by Swami
Eqs. (8) and (9) are calculated using ˇ, which is the wind incidence and Chandra [26] was selected as the best fit for the needs of this
angle (◦ ). work:
It has also been seen that the values of the constants C1 , C2 and C3
ˇ
depend on the wind direction. This is due to the fact that the flows Cp = Cp (ˇ = 0) × ln 1.248 − 0.703 sin − 1.175 sin2 ˇ
in the three cases (windward, leeward and parallel) are very differ- 2
ent one from each other and therefore also have different weighting ˇ ˇ
of the terms including wind pressure, thermal forces and fluctuat- +0.131 sin3 (2ˇG) + 0.769 cos + 0.07G2 sin2
2 2
ing forces. Contrarily to what could be expected, C1 does not have
the largest weight factor at windward side, but it remains the most ˇ
+0.717 cos2 (11)
dominating factor in this case. In the case with an opening located 2
on the leeward side of the building, the fluctuating term (the third
one of Eq. (7)) prevails. This is also the case for parallel wind situa- This expression calculates the surface pressure coefficient nor-
tions; however, the difference is not as high as it is for the leeward malized to the pressure coefficient at zero incidence angle as a
case. function of the wind incidence angle (ˇ) within a [0◦ , 180◦ ] domain,
R.Z. Freire et al. / Energy and Buildings 62 (2013) 222–229 225
Fig. 3. Experiments designs performed into the PowerDomus [33] software: (a) and (b) wind tunnel for cross and single-sided cases; (c) NOA building (single-sided case).
where values higher than 180◦ are obtained by symmetry, and 5. Experiments
G, the natural logarithm of the side ratio (ratio of the lengths of
adjacent walls L and W). For vertical walls, Swami and Chandra In this section, the experiments used to analyze and compare
recommend using a value of 0.6 for the pressure coefficient at zero the cross and single-sided ventilation models shown in the previous
incidence angle [27]. section are presented. The wind tunnel experiment presents results
for both cross and single-sided ventilation whereas the on-site one
is dedicated to the validation of the single-sided ventilation model.
4.2. CPCALC model
The CPCALC algorithm has been developed within the frame of 5.1. Wind tunnel experiment
the European Research Programme PASCOOL (Passive Cooling of
Buildings) of the Commission of the European Communities, Direc- The wind tunnel experiment has been carried out in a full-scale
torate General for Energy [28,29]. In 1992, the algorithm started to wind tunnel at the Japanese Building Research institute (BRI) by
be developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [27,30] Larsen [9] to investigate the airflow through openings in cross
within the COMIS workshop on infiltration and ventilation, and and single-sided ventilation situations. The building dimensions
being upgraded within the IEA-ANNEX 23 on multizone airflow are 5.56 m × 5.56 m × 3.00 m, which means that scale effects were
modeling [31]. avoided. The openings width and height are 0.86 m and 0.15 m for
CPCALC has been developed in order to fulfill the requirements both windows in the cross-ventilation case, positioned 0.54 m away
of multizone airflow models, which need a detailed evaluation of from the right edge and 0.925 m from the top as shown in Fig. 3a.
the wind pressure distribution around buildings. Scientists and pro- For the single-sided case, the openings dimensions are 0.86 m and
fessionals using this program, and who do not have the possibility 1.40 m of width and height, respectively. In this case, they are pos-
to test a scale model of their building in a wind tunnel, do not need itioned at 0.54 m away from the right edge and 0.69 m away from
to extrapolate CP data from tables usually yielding wall-averaged the top of the building as illustrated in Fig. 3b. The internal room
CP values [32]. height is 2.4 m and the thickness of the walls is 0.10 m. The room
The CPCALC model adopted in this work allows for calculating volume is 68.95 m3 .
wind pressure coefficients on the envelope of a block-shaped build- The experiment consisted in varying the wind speed in the tun-
ing with flat roof and uses the following input variables: ˇ wind nel (1, 3 and 5 m/s) with a turbulence intensity less than 5% while
incidence angle (◦ ), ˛: wind velocity profile [21], sbh: surrounding imposing distinct temperature differences of 0, 5 and 10 K between
building height (m), pad: plan area density (%), building height (m), the internal and external air. The wind speed profile created in this
wall azimuth (m) the coordinates x and y of the middle of the open- wind tunnel was almost uniform, which resulted in a wind profile
ing related to the origin of the building (m) and the frontal and side that differs from outdoor conditions as it was not able to reproduce
aspect ratios of the building (m). the atmospheric boundary layer. The buildings was also rotated
Based on these input data, the CPCALC algorithm is able to cal- between 0◦ and 345◦ with either a 15◦ or a 30◦ increase to get mea-
culate the pressure coefficient value at any point on a building surements for different angles of the wind. A total of 159 different
surface. In the present study, the interest point is the center of the cases were studied. The air-change rate was measured with the
openings. tracer gas decay method.
226 R.Z. Freire et al. / Energy and Buildings 62 (2013) 222–229
Table 2
Opening configuration and mean climatic conditions for single-sided ventilation
experiments in the NOA building.
Experiment TI TO U(10) ˇ
6. Results
Fig. 6. Comparisons between the experimental and simulation results performed into the PowerDomus software for the wind tunnel case with wind speeds of: (a) 1, (b) 3
and (c) 5 m/s – single-sided ventilation case.
the airflow rate averages obtained from three distinct temperature 6.1.2. Single-sided ventilation
differences results. In order to illustrate the behavior of each single-sided ven-
Results show that the British Standard (Mean CP ) model is not tilation model and to analyze the effect from different wind
capable of predicting the variation of the airflow according to the speeds (1, 3 and 5 m/s), temperature differences (0, 5 and 10 ◦ C)
wind direction and predict a nearly constant air change rate of and incidence angles (varying from 0 to 345◦ ) on the airflow,
2 h−1 . The British Standard (CPCALC) model tends to better follow 27 simulations using the PowerDomus software have been per-
this variation with air change rates varying between 0.5 and 3.5 h−1 . formed. Every simulation consists in varying the incidence angle
One particular drawback of the Mean CP -based model occurs when and obtaining the air change rate to each natural ventilation
the wind is parallel to the openings. In this case, this model predicts model.
no flow (the CP difference between the openings is null) whereas As simulation parameters, for the pressure coefficient calcula-
the CPCALC-based model is able to detect a small but noticeable tion through the Mean CP method an ˛ = 0.10 has been adopted,
airflow. which is the value when there are no obstructions affecting the
One small difference remains, i.e. the results between the 90◦ wind. For the CPCALC method the same ˛ = 0.10 has been used and
and 270◦ cases. This comes from the fact that CPCALC tables provide for the plan area density and surrounding building height the values
different measurement results for both angles according to the of pad = sbh = 0, have been adopted because there are no obstruc-
windward and leeward configurations. In fact, those two cases are tions inside the wind tunnel.
particularly sensitive as a very small deviation from 90◦ or 270◦ Fig. 6 presents the air-change rates as a function of the incidence
will change the airflow pattern around the building (and the CP angle and the temperature difference of 5 ◦ C. Each graphic repre-
values) and the windward/leeward status of the wall. In CPCALC, sents one of the selected wind speeds. Larsen’s model does present
two distinct correlations (one for windward, the other for leeward) the expected angular dependency. For the lower wind velocity,
exist and they don’t exactly match at those “boundary” angles. The wind and temperature gradient effects are about the same so that
authors have chosen to keep the original algorithm instead of cor- the third term of Eq. (6) really affects the results. In particular, the
recting them by averaged value or so, as they are not so different influence of the non-symmetrical term CP is visible for the inci-
in reality (0.1 on CP values). dence angle in 120◦ ≤ ˇ ≤ 240◦ . For higher wind velocity, the first
However, it can be seen that the two models present almost the term of Eq. (6), and f(ˇ) term, predominates so that the obtained air
same mean relative difference of about 30% considering the whole change rate becomes more symmetrical, at least when the Mean CP
set of data (Table 3). method is used.
It is can be noticed, from the results obtained by the de Gids
and Phaff model (Fig. 6), that there is no variation of the air change
rates with incidence angle. This happens because the model does
Table 3
Relative differences (%) for the wind tunnel experiment–cross ventilation case. not take into account the incidence angle in its formula. In this way,
a constant single value is obtained for each wind speed. However,
Model Relative differences (%)
the overall performance of de Gids and Phaff model should be taken
Mean CP (A) 32.46 into account especially in cases where orthogonal structures and
CPCALC (A) 31.11 low-rise buildings have to be simulated.
228 R.Z. Freire et al. / Energy and Buildings 62 (2013) 222–229
Table 4 Table 5
Relative differences (%) for the wind tunnel experiment – single-sided ventilation Relative differences for the NOA building experiment.
case.
Model Relative differences (%)
Model Windward Leeward Parallel
Larsen (mean CP ) 27.71
Larsen (mean CP ) 34.25 20.85 22.38 Larsen (CPCALC) 24.03
Larsen (CPCALC) 24.99 19.75 7.68 de Gids and Phaff 49.06
de Gids and Phaff 29.89 20.39 14.68
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