ON THE COUPLING OF THERMOSTATICALLY CONTROLLED BUILDINGS WITH GROUND AND NIGHT VENTILATION PASSIVE DISSIPATION TECHNIQUES

Passive cooling techniques applied to thermostatically controlled buil dings can contribute to reducing their cooling load significantly. Gro und and night ventilation techniques appear to be the more promising a mong the proposed dissipation techniques. Calculation of the specific contribution of night ventilation and ground cooling techniques requir es appropriate algorithms to account for the coupling of the passive w ith the active cooling system. The present article deals with the deve lopment of a new, integrated method to calculate the energy contributi on of ground and night ventilation dissipation techniques to the cooli ng load of thermostatically controlled buildings. The method is based on the principle of ''balance point temperature'' and succeeds in esti mating the hourly value of the balance temperature of a building. In a ddition, it calculates the cooling load of the building as well as the global contribution of the ground and night ventilation techniques. A n extensive validation procedure has been followed using data from an extended version of TRNSYS including detailed algorithms to simulate d ynamically the thermal performance of night ventilation and earth-to-a ir heat exchangers. Very good agreement between the results predicted by TRNSYS and the present method is found. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science L td.