Modeling ventilated double skin façade—A zonal approach

This article presents the application of the zonal approach for modeling airflow and temperature in a ventilated double skin facades (DSF). The zonal airflow equation, power-law, was employed to calculate the airflow through the shading device and cavities. The zonal energy equation was used to evaluate the temperature distribution in the DSF system. The predicted temperature distributions were verified using measured values and parametric studies were conducted to identify the influence of height, flow rate and presence of venetian blinds on the inlet–outlet temperature difference. The influence of changing the values of each parameter was found to be more apparent during the day than during the night. The inlet–outlet temperature difference increased as height of the DSF increased and when venetian blinds were installed but it was found to decrease as the airflow rate increased. The results had revealed that the zonal approach can be employed to provide information on the performance of DSF faster and at very low computational resource.