Natural ventilation in a double-skin facade

Double-skin facades are assuming an ever-greater importance in modem building practice. There is an increasing demand for higher quality office buildings. Occupants and developers of office buildings ask for a healthy and stimulating working environment. Double-skin facades are appropriate when buildings are subject to great external noise and wind loads. A further area of application is in rehabilitation work, when existing facades cannot be renewed, or where this is not desirable. Double-skin facades have a special aesthetic of their own, and this can be exploited architecturally to great advantage. However, there are still relatively few buildings in which double-skin facades have actually been realized, and there is still too little experience of their behavior in operation. In this matter, we choose to study the natural ventilation in multi-storey double-skin facades. Simulations where realized with TAS software on a building proposed in the frame of the subtask A of the Task 27 (performance of solar facade components) of the International Energy Agency, Solar Heating and Cooling Program. We decide to study a sunny summer day; and we analyze the double-skin facade behavior for various conditions: impact of the double-skin orientation and impact of the wind orientation and the degree of wind protection. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved