Wind-driven and buoyancy effects for modeling natural ventilation in buildings at urban scale

This work proposes a new model to evaluate the air changes per hour (ach) due to natural infiltrations in buildings. This modeling already exists at building scale, but the new model will implement the hourly ventilation load in a physical-based modeling for space heating and cooling in buildings at urban scale. The proposed improvement considers the wind and buoyancy effects in the calculation of hourly achs in a high-density urban context. A three-zone air flow lumped modeling is applied to describe the air flow in buildings; the air flow rate due to infiltrations is calculated depending only on leakages’ characteristics and pressure variations in various climate conditions. The non-linear equations system of mass and energy conservation is solved by an iterative procedure using the Newton-Raphson numerical method. Besides, two different methodologies are compared to evaluate the external dynamic and static pressure conditions on building façades: experimental values (pressure coefficients Cp) and CFD simulations. For the latter, the air flow field in the urban canyons is described by the windy conditions and by imposing a temperature gradient due to solar irradiation between the windward and leeward facades. This methodology is applied to three urban canyons in Turin, with typical aspect ratios and orientations for some local climate conditions considering both heating and cooling seasons. Comparing the results of hourly ach obtained from the Cp method, the CFD technique allows to modulate the ach considering the impact of the canyon dimension, wind and buoyancy effect of non-isothermal condition, in varying the wind speed on the façades of buildings for different scenarios. It also overcomes the limit of field of applications of Cp, especially in high-density built urban environments. The encouraging results of this work will lead to future developments of the three-zone lumped model and its numerical solution techniques.