Natural ventilation for office building retrofit in dense urban context under hot and humid climate

Abstract Recent studies underline that simple and non-invasive retrofit solutions can recover natural ventilation potential in existing buildings under temperate climate. Nonetheless, the efficiency of these dense urban contexts hot humid climate remains unclear. This paper aims to evaluate thermal comfort gains caused by when retrofitting an office building downtown Rio de Janeiro. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are carried out on Ansys CFX Design builder assess indoor air flow before after retrofit. The diagnosis current scenario indicates surrounding block a significant part wind flow, occupants experience only few hours during year, especially lower floors. To increase fixed upper windows were transformed into pivot kept open permanently. measure increases annual 0.5-35%, depending floor adaptive model. These findings suggest itself may not be sufficient ensure occupants' throughout year investigated context.