Performance evaluation of climate-adaptive natural ventilation design: A case study of semi-open public cultural building

Abstract

Naturally ventilated buildings play a vital role in mitigating climate change since they produce lower CO₂ emissions compared to mechanically ventilated alternatives. Also, occupants have better experiences in naturally ventilated buildings than in mechanically ventilated buildings. However, the application of natural ventilation design is often hindered by extreme weather conditions. To cope with such problems, this paper proposes climate adaptive natural ventilation designs which utilize and adapt to the local climate. The ventilation performance of this design is quantitatively evaluated using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. The CFD simulation is first validated against experiments and then utilized to reproduce the wind flow inside the building for all four seasons. The evaluation parameters include air changes per hour (ACH), wind speed at the pedestrian level and wind flow patterns indoors. Results showed that this climate adaptive natural ventilation meets the requirements of the Chinese green building assessment standards (GB/T50378-2019) with the highest ACH value of up to 15.8 times per hour. Furthermore, the wind speed at pedestrian level varies from 0.08 m/s to 0.39 m/s. The practice and findings reported in this paper can be useful for future development of sustainable, climate-adaptive buildings.