Increasing Ventilation by Passive Strategies: Analysis of Indoor Air Circulation Changes through the Utilization of Microclimate Elements

Abstract

A demand for renewable alternatives that would be able to deal with the problems related to well-being is di-rectly linked to the world's growing needs to save energy and reduce environmental costs. For a project imple-mentation addressing these issues, it is essential to know the climatic conditions of the target area. Taking natu-ral 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 im-posed 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 in-compressibility 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.