Assessment of Different Natural Ventilation Strategies for an Educational Building on the Warm-Humid Climate of Guayaquil, Ecuador

Natural ventilation has been studied as an effective strategy in order to reduce energy consumption without compromising occupant’s hygrothermal comfort in warm-humid climates. However, the main concern about the current state of art in the use of Building Energy Simulation (BES) as an approach to natural ventilation is the definition of input data which usually do not represent the real state of the buildings in the studied region. Within this context, the main contribution of this research is to propose a methodology through which the real state of buildings can be evaluated. By this analysis, valid input parameters was found to exploit the capabilities of BES and CFD simulations to fulfill the main objective of this study, which is to assess the impact of natural ventilation strategies in the energy consumption of HVAC systems and occupants hygrothermal comfort. Four natural ventilation strategies were evaluated: single sided ventilation, cross ventilation, solar chimney and double façade. The results show that the exclusive use of natural ventilation is ineffective to ensure hygrothermal comfort in a building with high thermal loads in a warm-humid climate like Guayaquil. However, by using a hybrid system (natural ventilation/dehumidification and cooling) cooling energy consumption can be reduced in up to 10.6% without compromising occupant’s hygrothermal comfort. Due to the promising results regarding energy savings, further research will aim to evaluate the impact of other passive strategies in energy consumption.