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Evaluation of thermal comfort and air changes in indoor environments with solar chimneys

Abstract

The use of natural ventilation strategies to provide thermal comfort and air changes is necessary in most of the Brazilian territory. In this context, solar chimneys can promote benefits such as increase air changes and enhance the thermal comfort of building users. This paper aims to investigate the ability of a solar chimney model to provide thermal comfort and air changes in classrooms and offices. We ran two stages of energy performance simulations on EnergyPlus: the first stage evaluated parameters such as height, number of installed devices per room and solar orientation aimed at providing more hours of comfort and air renewal in four Brazilian cities; the second stage expanded the scope of the devices/rooms simulated to eight Brazilian cities. In the second evaluation, the variation of climate conditions had an impact of up to 80% on comfort hours. The influence of the devices led to an average increase of 28% in comfort in classrooms and 21% in offices. The air change rates were between 2.4 and 13.5 ACH. The best performances were observed in the cities in ZB1, ZB2, ZB3, ZB4, and ZB5, demonstrating the potential benefits using this solar chimney in those bioclimatic zones.

Keywords:
Solar chimney; Natural ventilation; EnergyPlus; Thermal confort; Air changes

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