Natural Ventilation Potential of Urban Buildings

Abstract The design of a building should provide the flow paths needed for natural ventilation. Therefore, the decision to apply natural ventilation should be taken early in the building design process, when little information is available for airflow estimation. To deal with this lack of data, a semi-qualitative method to assess the potential of an urban site to host a naturally ventilated building is proposed. First, natural ventilation driving forces and constraints are assessed by using comfort criteria, statistical meteorological data and user-provided information. Then, the site of interest is compared to other, well known sites using criteria related to both natural ventilation driving forces and constraints. This method compares and ranks the site within the base sites using a qualitative multicriteria analysis procedure. The result of the comparison shows if the assessed site has a higher potential for application of natural ventilation than a set of known sites.