Santamouris, M.; Mihalakakou, G.; Asimakopoulos, D.N.
March 1997
Solar Energy, vol 60-3, p. 191-197
Passive cooling techniques applied to thermostatically controlled buildings can contribute to reducing their cooling load significantly. Ground and night ventilation techniques appear to be the more promising among the proposed dissipation techniques. Calculation of the specific contribution of night ventilation and ground cooling techniques requires appropriate algorithms to account for the coupling of the passive with the active cooling system. The present article deals with the development of a new, integrated method to calculate the energy contribution of ground and night ventilation dissipation techniques to the cooling load of thermostatically controlled buildings. The method is based on the principle of "balance point temperature" and succeeds in estimating the hourly value of the balance temperature of a building. In addition, it calculates the cooling load of the building as well as the global contribution of the ground and night ventilation techniques. An extensive validation procedure has been followed using data from an extended version of TRNSYS including detailed algorithms to simulate dynamically the thermal performance of night ventilation and earth-to-air heat exchangers. Very good agreement between the results predicted by TRNSYS and the present method is found.
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