Conference Paper

Proceedings of Building Simulation 2021: 17th Conference of IBPSA

Full-scale validation of natural ventilation models in Stanford’s Y2E2 building

Chen Chen, Catherine Gorlé
Stanford University, United States of America

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26868/25222708.2021.30679
Abstract: Natural ventilation and cooling offer significant potential for energy savings, but their system performance is strongly dependent on local weather and building operating conditions. Computational models can evaluate these effects and support robust natural ventilation design, but their accuracy should be carefully evaluated and balanced with their computational efficiency. This study considers model validation for buoyancy-driven nighttime ventilation in an operational educational building. A full-scale experiment was carefully designed and executed to support validation of (1) a building thermal model that predicts the volume-averaged building temperature, and (2) a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model that resolves the spatial variability in the temperature field. This paper focuses on validation of the CFD model, which is shown to predict the measured local temperatures with an RMSE of less than 0.8 °C. In regions not directly adjacent to windows the RMSE can drop below 0.3 °C.
Keywords: CFD simulations, atrium building, natural ventilation, validation, full-scale experiment
Pages: 3212 - 3219
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