Study on Air Flow Behavior Through Double-Wall Building

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to study the influence of solar intensity, air gap width and size of inlet/outlet opening to temperature and velocity distribution in double-wall building by computational fluid dynamics technique. It has inlet opening at the bottom and outlet opening at the top of inner wall which is kept at uniform temperature. The outer wall is heated with uniform heat flux. When the air enters the spacing between walls from the bottom opening, it is heated up by the conduction through the outer wall and then flow upward through the top opening due to buoyancy effect. The results indicates that the velocity and temperature of the air within air gap increases with the increasing of solar intensity but the velocity of air at the edge of the wall is zero because the roughness of the wall and the viscosity of the air. Moreover, increasing the size of the vents, decreasing the velocity of the air due to buoyancy force. In addition, the velocity of the air increases when the size of opening is increased but the temperature of the air is decrease due to the increasing of mass flow rate.