The Study of Natural Ventilation in Residential Buildings

Natural ventilation is most preferred by people for cooling and for providing fresh air. However, the availability of adequate natural ventilation in dwellings to allow occupants to enjoy a healthy and comfortable environment is not simply by the provision of openable windows. There are other contributing factors including the window types, building orientations, openings configurations, surrounding buildings characteristics, and prevailing wind conditions. They all play very significant role in ensuring adequate natural ventilation in dwellings.;Taking all the above factors into account, this thesis presents a study of influence of openings configurations and window types on the natural ventilation performance of a hypothetical residential unit.;Natural ventilation performance of eight openings configurations for the hypothetical residential unit was evaluated. The evaluation considered four building orientations and three prevailing wind conditions. The results indicate that better natural ventilation performance can be achieved by locating two window groups (bedroom windows and living room windows) in opposite directions or in perpendicular to each other. As to the influence of different factors, it is noted that natural ventilation performance is most sensitive to changes in relative windows positions, followed by building orientations and door positions.;Natural ventilation performance of four commonly used window types was also investigated. It was found that when dealing with cross configurations, better natural ventilation performance could be achieved by using full end-slider and side hung windows; while for single-sided configurations, side hung windows performed better than other types of windows to conclude that side hung windows were a better option.;The last part of this study is to take into account the complex influence of the surrounding building conditions on the results of the above studies. The results indicate that when adding the influence of surroundings buildings, wind speed was reduced and wind direction was changed. Despite wind conditions were affected, the conclusions drawn on the influence of openings configurations and window types on natural ventilation performance were still valid.