Experimental study on perfomance of wind catcher in tropical climate

Abstract

Today, the knowledge of using natural ventilation in buildings with consideration of traditional architecture of different areas, has become an important factor to consider in the buildings. The focus is on increasing the quality of space regarding to climate and environmental parameters. Iran is a country with vast and different types of climate and each one has come with it's own harmonic way and response in architecture. In these study conventional traditional buildings exposed to the hot and humid weather in the northern coast of Persian Gulf and Oman Sea is considered. The wind catcher is widely applied in these areas to enhance the natural ventilation in buildings. Studying the regional measures of the local expert architects can contribute to a suitable building design for such a climate. This paper aims to study how the wind catcher works by the wind-tunnel testing and CFD simulations. The main objective of this research is to discover how a wind catcher works by considering climate situations of a tropical region. The results show that increasing the height optimizes a wind catcher's performance by taking other appropriate variables. Furthermore, this study shows that the proposed system, even at relatively low speed outdoor wind, is able to create ventilation in a residential unit. According to the results of the wind-tunnel test and CFD simulations, the wind catcher can be used in hot and humid tropical areas to help create thermal comfort in green buildings by increasing the natural ventilation.