Impact of Ventilation on the Thermal Comfort by Operable Window in a Typical UAE Office
Date
2015-04
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Publisher
The British University in Dubai (BUiD)
Abstract
Natural ventilation has been the main feature for maintaining thermal comfort in a space since ages. The research intends to merge the use of natural and artificial ventilation to create a comfortable thermal environment for the occupants of an office. It also helps to reduce the total energy consumption of the building. Statistics suggest that UAE has been considered as one of the major per capita consumers of electricity and water, (Dubai Carbon, 2014). In order to reduce the total energy consumption, a strategy is formulated to use natural ventilation in office space with the use of operable windows.
The study was conducted on a typical office building in Dubai, UAE. Integrated Environment Solutions (IES VE 2013) was used to analyze the various configurations on the virtual office created. The main factors that are taken into consideration in this system are the orientation of the opening, type of window, percentage opening of the window, the flow rate of the incoming air, the desired temperature of the occupant and the status of the external environment. An automation profile is created for ventilation so that it is available under the best suited weather conditions to reduce the use of air conditioners by making the interior thermally comfortable to the people. The total favorable hours is taken as the criteria of initial study. Based on these criteria specific cases were chosen to have the configuration for least energy consumption.
The research concludes that a reduction of 35.49% in the annual energy consumption can be obtained from a combined ventilation systems. It is also noted that the major saving happens when there are more hours of favorable temperature which is the winter season. The temperature chosen by the occupant plays a major role in the energy reduction criteria. It was noticed that the major energy reduction is obtained by maintaining a proper set point temperature. The ventilation combined system also performs in a similar pattern at a lower level of energy consumption. The difference in the energy consumption between the two systems varies from 3% to 5%. The study concludes with the understanding that the ventilation pattern when incorporated into cooling system reduces the energy consumption but significant energy saving can be done using the right set point temperature. Also it can be noticed that the maximum saving occurs during the winter season.
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Keywords
thermal comfort, United Arab Emirates (UAE), natural ventilation, energy consumption