Numerical and Experimental Investigation of a Wind Catcher with Horizontally-arranged Heat Transfer Devices (HHTD)

Abstract—This study investigates the ventilation and thermal performance of a wind catcher with horizontally-arrange heat transfer devices (HHTD) for passive cooling in hot climates using numerical and experimental methods. Rapid prototyping was used to create a detailed experimental scale model. Low-speed wind tunnel and flow visualiastion tests were conducted on the wind catcher model with HHTD. The wind tunnel test setup was recreated in the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. The comparison between the experimental data and simulation results demonstrated good agreement. The results showed that the wind catcher with HHTD was capable of reducing the indoor air temperature by up to 12 K. The technology presented here is subject to a patent application (1321709.6). Keywords- Buildings; indoor air; natural ventilation; passive cooling; sustainable I