Paper Conference

Proceedings of eSim 2018: 10th Conference of IBPSA-Canada

     

Scale Modelling of Ventilative Buildings

Dahai Qi, Xin Zhang, Cheng Zhang, Andreas Athienitis, Liangzhu Wang

Abstract: Free cooling from natural ventilation is an effective energy saving measure. Understanding naturally-driven airflow is important because it is directly related to its efficiency of heat removal. While full-scale building tests reflect a real-world scenario of a ventilative building, they are often costly and time consuming, more importantly, complicated by many uncertainties in the field. In comparison, sub-scaled experiments provide a faster evaluation of the underlying physics at a much less cost. However, the proper scaling is unavailable from the literature. This study aims to develop a series of new scaling methods of thermal airflows in ventilative buildings supported by both experimental studies and numerical simulations of the sub-scale model and the corresponding full-scale building. Comparison of the sub-scale experiments and the full-scale simulations showed that the new scaling methods are able to conserve thermal airflow physics properly at both scales.
Keywords: Scale modelling, ventilative buildings, experimental, numerical
Pages: 351 - 356
Paper:
esim2018_2-1-B-1