Numerical Modeling of Air Flow in Solar Chimney (Technical Note)

Building industry is one of the most energy consuming parts of the developed and developing countries. Cooling, heating and ventilating systems devote a great amount of this consumption so studying natural ventilation systems have become more important in order to improve their performance. In this paper, air flow has modeled by a computational fluid dynamic model with finite volume method in solar chimney as a new kind of natural ventilation system and in a combined system with Baadgir. For this reason, different turbulent models have been compared by a valid statistical test in order to find a suitable turbulent model in these systems and at the end a ke-RNG model has been selected. Also the effect of increasing height, span width and thermal gradient of the walls on improvement of solar chimney’s performance have been studied by computing parameters like mass flow rate and mean velocity.