Abstract In this paper, the behaviour of a special roofing system is investigated. It is a passive building component that consists of a ventilated roof with a maintained wet lower surface of the cavity over which flows the external air. The authors have carried out numerical simulations of the thermal field, flow field and water vapour concentration of air within the duct for thermal performance evaluation purposes. In order to obtain an estimate of the thermal cooling flux on the wet surface, suitable procedures were coded and linked to a commercial program for computational fluid dynamics (CFX 4.4). An original approach to solve a coupled heat and mass transfer problem is presented. Results of numerical simulations of the temperature field and the values of the mean specific heat and mass fluxes of the wet lower surface are shown. Numerical problems that have been dealt with, due to particular physical phenomena such as boundary coupled fields and radiation between cavity surfaces, are highlighted.