Improving Airflow Performance Models for Passive Solar and Natural Ventilation Design: Comparing Simulation and Preliminary Measurements

To achieve net-zero energy buildings, a complex relationship exists between orientation, spatial composition, building fabric, and thermal and climatic conditions. Airflow conditions are the result of balancing the above relationships and directly affect occupant comfort. The opportunity for architects is that airflow and related energy performance can be organized by spatial composition. Understanding the indoor airflow movement and related energy performance can promote the effectiveness of space planning. A solar house built in 2009 for the Solar Decathlon competition held by U.S. Department of Energy has now been re-established as a community field laboratory to study its overall energy performance. This paper focuses on studying the airflow movement in the solar house with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Furthermore, the passive heating and cooling effects are initially compared with onsite temperature measurements from an advanced data acquisition system installed at the house based on one year of data collection. Our final goal is to develop design guidelines based on numerical analysis and onsite measurements characterizing airflow patterns in complex residential spaces.