Flow and Concentration Fields in a Naturally Ventilated Model Building: Impact of Monodraught Wind Catcher

In contemporary design of urban buildings, effective sustainable ventilation systems are gaining increasing attention. Wind catchers are considered as one of the beneficial alternatives for conventional ventilation systems. However appropriate design and integration of wind catchers are fundamental for providing acceptable air quality and extracting still and contaminated air from inside of buildings. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) provides a strong platform to study the flow pattern and to illustrate the main flow features in the flow field. Basic characteristics of flow and pollutant concentration fields in four different monodraught wind catchers/window configurations are comparatively discussed. A three-dimensional steady RANS simulation is used for the computations. According to the results, the combination of a monodraught wind catcher as an inlet and a window as an outlet shows the more appropriate performance among the four combinations, whilst the two monodraught wind catcher configuration provides the less effective ventilation in comparison with the other cases. The configuration of a window as an entering part and a monodraught wind catcher as an exhausting part reduces the ventilation performance to some extent but not as much as the two wind catcher configuration

Keywords:

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) , Flow field , Concentration field , Monodraught Wind catcher , Natural ventilation