Numerical investigation of wind-driven natural ventilation performance in a multi-storey hospital by coupling indoor and outdoor airflow Show others and affiliations
2016 (English) In: Indoor + Built Environment, ISSN 1420-326X, E-ISSN 1423-0070, Vol. 25, no 8, p. 1226-1247Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
This study employed two ventilation indexes: local mean age of air and air change rate per hour, to investigate wind-induced natural ventilation of 260 wards of a multi-storey hospital building in suburb of Guangzhou using computational fluid dynamics simulations. Using the surface-grid extrusion technique, high-quality hexahedral grid cells were generated for the coupled outdoor and indoor airflow field. Turbulence was solved by the renormalisation group k-model validated against experimental data with grid independence studies. Homogeneous tracer gas emission was adopted to predict room age of air. The air change rate of cross ventilation and single-sided ventilation can reach 30-160 h-1 and 0.5-7 h-1, respectively. Due to different locations of room openings on the balconies, natural ventilation of a room can be greatly better than its neighbouring room. The wind-induced cross ventilation highly depends on the distance from the room opening to the stagnation point and on the resulting pressure distribution on the target building surface. Furthermore, it is significantly influenced by the upstream buildings, the bent shape of the target building, and the prevailing wind directions. The coupled computational fluid dynamics methodologies with integrated ventilation indexes are useful for assessing the natural ventilation performance in other complex built environments.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages 2016. Vol. 25, no 8, p. 1226-1247
Keywords [en]
Age of air, Air change rate per hour (ACH), Computational fluid dynamics (CFD), Coupling indoor and outdoor, Hospital natural ventilation
National Category
Fluid Mechanics Building Technologies
Identifiers URN: urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-22976 DOI: 10.1177/1420326X15595689 ISI: 000389051600005 Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-84995771502 OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hig-22976 DiVA, id: diva2:1052805
2016-12-072016-12-072025-02-09 Bibliographically approved