A Study of Single-Sided Ventilation and Provision of Balconies in the Context of High-Rise Residential Buildings

Abstract

Passive design strategy is an important approach to reduce energy consumption of a building such as improving indoor thermal comfort through enhanced natural ventilation performance. This is crucial in achieving a more sustainable building especially for a tall high density residential development where energy consumption is huge. This paper looks into the potential of high-rise residential buildings to utilize abundant naturally available prevailing wind by mean of passive design strategy. Its objective is to investigate the potential to improve the ventilation performance of a single-sided ventilation strategy of high-rise residential buildings by introducing a series of balconies on their façades. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was used as a tool for investigation. Since CFD requires a validation process to investigate its reliability, existing wind tunnel experiments and empirical models were used in the validation process. This study found that an appropriate combination of balcony configurations and single-sided ventilation strategy could improve indoor ventilation performance of high-rise residential buildings; however, incorrect combination could further reduce the ventilation performance of an already inefficient ventilation strategy. Therefore, understanding the concept of single-sided ventilation strategy is crucial, and application of appropriate tools such as CFD is important to ensure ventilation performance optimization is achieved.