TITLE:
Increasing Ventilation by Passive Strategies: Analysis of Indoor Air Circulation Changes through the Utilization of Microclimate Elements
AUTHORS:
Patricia R. C. Drach, José Karam-Filho
KEYWORDS:
Increasing Ventilation by Passive Strategies: Analysis of Indoor Air Circulation Changes through the Utilization of Microclimate Elements
JOURNAL NAME:
Applied Mathematics,
Vol.5 No.3,
February
12,
2014
ABSTRACT:
A demand for renewable alternatives that would be able to deal with the
problems related to well-being is directly linked to the world’s growing needs to
save energy and reduce environmental costs. For a project implementation addressing
these issues, it is essential to know the climatic conditions of the target
area. Taking natural ventilation, climatic factors, and renewable alternatives as important
sources of comfort, in this work, passive strategies, through the utilization
of microclimate elements as well as the location of outside obstacles, were imposed on an initial
and specific project. The objective was to introduce obstacles which could
interfere in the field of external wind and evaluate whether this outside
intervention is able to make changes in indoor air circulation. The wind fields
for the studied cases were obtained by computational simulations, and their
consequences were analyzed to attain thermal comfort. The method adopted to
obtain the wind fields was a Petrov-Galerkin type method, which is a stabilized
mixed finite element method of the Navier-Stokes equations considering the incompressibility and
formulated in primitive variables, velocity and pressure. The obtained results
point to the solutions that promote the increase or decrease of the wind-field
intensity.