Extract

In mild climatic conditions, residential houses are often ventilated by opening windows. However, the resulting bi-directional airflow mechanism in single-sided naturally ventilated spaces is complex due to the involvement of buoyancy and wind driving forces along with wind turbulence and turbulence created at the opening. In addition, the wind effect might be reinforcing or restricting the buoyancy-driven natural ventilation. The consequence of these numerous effects on indoor flow-fields and particularly convective heat transfer on the floor needs further examination. In this respect, the earlier studies demonstrated that heat transfer of the floor was strongly influenced by the Rayleigh number (Ra) and the Window Opening Fraction (WOF) particularly in a buoyancy-driven single-sided natural ventilation set up. In an attempt to understand the influence of varying wind conditions, this work utilized Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for numerically, examining a single-sided partly opened air-filled cubical enclosure. The results indicate that both the indoor flow-fields and heat transfer on the floor are strongly influenced by the outside wind conditions. As such, there is a significant scope of lowering the uncertainty of floor heat transfer estimation of a naturally ventilated buildings by including the effect of varying outdoor wind conditions in the existing empirical correlations.

PDF

Download