The Breathing Buildings team contributes
significantly to research into natural ventilation. Our links with
the University of Cambridge research team at the BP Institute are
very strong. See below for a reference list of background useful
papers and articles.
1) Linden, P.F.,
Lane-Serff, G.F., Smeed, D.A. Emptying filling boxes: the fluid
mechanics of natural ventilation. Journal Fluid Mechanics 1990;
212: 309-335
One of the seminal texts in natural ventilation
- an excellent early paper in the field of natural ventilation. It
focuses mainly on ventilation with point sources of heat. The most
extreme example of this is a fire, and is therefore a valuable
reference not only for general natural ventilation engineers but
for fire and smoke engineers too.
2)
Gladstone, C., Woods, A.W. On buoyancy-driven natural ventilation
of a room with a heated floor. Journal Fluid Mechanics; 2001; 441:
293-314
This paper was one of the first to extend the
principles of natural ventilation to cases of a distributed heat
load at floor level. It tackles the fundamental challenge of
ventilation but without the complexity of plumes which arise from
point sources.
3) Linden, P.F. The
fluid mechanics of natural ventilation. Annual Review Fluid
Mechanics 1999; 31: 201-238
This is probably the most useful standalone
academic paper ever written in the field of natural ventilation. It
is a review paper and therefore covers a number of aspects of
natural ventilation design challenges. If you have time just to
read one paper as an introduction to natural ventilation, this is
the one to have with you when you curl up on a sofa and inwardly
digest!
4)
Fitzgerald, S.D.; Woods, A.W. 2007 Transient natural ventilation of
a room with a distributed heat source. J. Fluid Mech. J. Fluid
Mech. 591, 21-42.
Up until 2007, much of the research in natural
ventilation had involved steady state solutions. However, there are
certain building types where transient changes in temperature,
stratification etc. are not just interesting, but crucial when it
comes to designing a natural ventilation strategy for a building.
This paper tackles the case of a uniformly distributed heat load at
floor level and investigates the temperature profiles which develop
- there are some lovely photographs of laboratory analogue
experiments which corroborate the theory.
5)
Fitzgerald, S.D.; Woods, A.W. 2010 Transient natural ventilation of
a space with localised heating. Building and Environment, 45(12),
2778-2789.
This paper follows on from the 2007 paper and
tackles the case of a localised heat load at floor level and
investigates the temperature profiles which develop - again there
are some lovely photographs of laboratory analogue experiments
which corroborate the theory.
6)
Woods, A.W, Fitzgerald, S.; Livermore, S. 2009 A comparison of
winter pre-heating requirements for natural displacement and
natural mixing ventilation. Energy and Buildings. 41,
1306-1312.
This paper goes into detail about the potential
energy savings which can be made by adopting mixing ventilation
rather than displacement ventilation in winter - if you want to
understand why the e-stack system has been developed, this is the
paper to read!
7)
Fitzgerald, S.D.; Woods, A.W. 2008 The influence of stacks on flow
patterns and stratification associated with natural ventilation.
Building and Environment, 43, 1719-1733.
Anyone who thinks that it is easy to design
stack based natural ventilation with more than one stack or upper
level vent needs to read this. At first glance, a room with a
single stack, a lower window and an upper window may seem
straightforward in terms of figuring out the various potential
ventilation flow patterns. This paper describes just how complex it
can be - even if there is unidirectional flow through each
vent.
8)
Whole Building Solution Ventilation Strategy Selection-A Toolkit,
CIBSE Technical Symposium