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ABSTRACT: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has become an attractive alternative application
tool to investigate outdoor and indoor airflows for buildings in comparison to other airflow prediction
models. However, CFD comes with two main setbacks: it requires a large amount of computation and
its results are often difficult to assess and require a validation process. In the case of a multi-storey
residential building, it is always a limitation faced by researchers to simultaneously simulate both
outdoor and indoor airflows of the building, due to its large scale and high complexity.

This is a preliminary study in which various CFD setups are investigated prior to subsequent
investigation of wind-driven ventilation performance in a multi-storey residential building. The
objectives of this study are: a. to simultaneously predict outdoor and indoor airflows using CFD; b. to
investigate various CFD setups as an optimization process and; c. to analyse the accuracy of the CFD
results against existing wind tunnel data and empirical models as a validation process. This study
found that CFD can provide reasonably accurate results for prediction of coupled outdoor and indoor
airflows for a multi-storey building, but it comes with some limitations.

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