Prediction of indoor air circulation of residential room with adaptation of solar chimney using numerical technique

Abstract

With the exponential increase in consumption of electrical power during the summer season by household, there is a great need for households to withhold sustainability. To maintain the temperature of the household a passive heating and cooling system is used i.e. Solar Chimney. Ventilation, through a natural convection process, is gaining a lot of attention to be an alternative technique for mechanical air conditioning ventilation because of its reduced power usage when compared to the external cooling devices used in residential buildings of hot regions. The present study, involve solar chimney of horizontal and vertical designs in comparison with different width and height. The following paper studies the effect of a solar chimney on the indoor thermal behavior using Numerical Technique for a prototype of a residential room. The performance on the ventilation velocity and air temperature operation inside the room with varying air gap width is studied based on multiple numerical analysis solutions. The present study deals with two different architectures of a two dimensional model and results have shown that the ventilation velocity has increased to 0.017626444 kg/s and operative air temperature has been decreased by 7.26ºC for the vertical model while the horizontal model has shown a mass flow rate of 0.018027636 kg/s and a temperature decrease of 9.15ºC. The most efficient chimney was found to be model 7 which is horizontal solar chimney 3 with an air gap width of 0.05625m and a height of 0.3175 m, when compared to the other models from model number one to six.