CFD Analysis of Wind Induced Natural Ventilation in Rectangular Wind Catchers with Different Blade Pattern

Energy consumed in our buildings for various purposes such as cooling, heating, and ventilation systems take over 60% of total building energy utilization. As the result of these, the notion of Natural Ventilation has been increasingly considered by the stakeholders in building investment as to lessen the energy consumption. Wind catcher is one of the green features to provide natural ventilation. This paper focuses on studying the influence of internal blades in rectangular wind catcher on ventilation rate. In this paper, CFD commercial code was used to assess the ventilation rate through different apertures of wind catcher. It was found that the impact of internal blades on air flow rate in wind catchers with same geometries is not significant when the wind blow perpendicular to the wind catcher. The performance of wind catcher is higher in plan geometries with fewer blades in non perpendicular wind angles.

Keywords:

natural ventilation , CFD simulation , wind catcher , wind catcher’s blades