Impact of wind pressure coefficients on the natural ventilation effectiveness of buildings through simulations

Abstract

Natural Ventilation Effectiveness (NVE) is a performance metric that quantifies when outdoor airflows can be used as a cooling strategy to achieve indoor thermal comfort. Based on standard ventilation threshold and building energy simulation (BES) models, the NVE relates available and required airflows to quantify the usefulness of natural ventilation (NV) through design and building evaluation. Since wind is a significant driving force for ventilation, wind pressure coefficients (Cp) represent a critical boundary condition when assessing building airflows. Therefore, this paper investigates the impact of different Cp sources on wind-driven NVE results to see how sensitive the metric is to this variable. For that, an experimental house and a measurement period were used to develop and calibrate the initial BES model. Four Cp sources are considered: an analytical model from the BES software (i), surface-averaged Cp values for building windows that were calculated with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations using OpenFOAM through a cloud-based platform (iia,b,c), and two databases-AIVC (iii) and Tokyo Polytechnic University (TPU) (iv). The results show a variance among the Cp sources, which directly impacts airflow predictions; however, its effect on the performance metric was relatively small. The variation in the NVE outcomes with different Cp’s was 3% at most, and the assessed building could be naturally ventilated around 75% of the investigated time on the first floor and 60% in the ground floor spaces.