Performance Evaluation of Four-Sided Square Wind Catchers with Different Geometries by Numerical Method

Abstract

The extensive enhance of using air conditioning to cool and ventilate buildings in hot - arid climate regions have turned into an actual crisis since these systems consume high load of electricity. Recently, green ventilation features such as wind catchers have been utilized as a solution in order to improve indoor air quality and decrease energy consumption. The most common ventilation device in hot and hot-humid areas of Iran was wind catcher or "Badgir". This study is an outline of the results of a research on the wind catcher element in the traditional architecture of Iran. An appraisal of the wind towers' individuality with prominence on their morphology is presented and classification of the wind towers based on their physical characteristic and parameters are thus proposed. This paper also presents a limited wind driven simulation results which shows the impact of different square wind catcher's plan geometry on the indoor ventilation rate. The simulations accomplished using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), reveal the effect of four different square wind catchers on the indoor ventilation rate.