Raising Climate Resilience in Buildings on the Western Mediterranean Coast — Merging Passive and Active Natural Ventilative Cooling Techniques

This paper presents the considered capabilities to improve space cooling energy efficiency in the Mediterranean climate ambience by merging and optimizing selected natural ventilative techniques. The first part of this analysis defines a set of control strategies based on specific configurations of cross ventilation and fan-assisted advanced natural ventilation. The objective is to take advantage of principally lower nocturnal temperature ranges, due to being less affected by the current climate change effects, and to reflect such a potential in the reduction of day-time cooling energy loads. The second part of the study examines the integration of defined control strategies into a climate responsive building form of a mid-rise office-type building positioned in three different geograph ical locations along the Catalonian coastline—the cities of Barcelona, Terrassa and Tarragona. In order to provide a comparative overview of energy efficiency for each applied control strategy, the building model is exposed parallel to present and future estimated climate change effects in the building performance simulation environment while the general control and adjustments of established indoor airflow patterns are done by computational fluid dynamics analyses. The generated output demonstrates that under the present-day climate conditions the achieved reduction of cooling energy demands is in the range between 53% and 65%. Looking further at the horizon of 2050, it accounts between 58% and 62%, while in 2080 the overall cut in cooling energy demands is between 54% and 57%. The comparative overview indicates that despite the rise of day-time temperatures due to climate change effects, the proposed bioclimatic responsive building form based on lower nocturnal temperatures displays considered capabilities in cutting cooling energy demands in the Mediterranean climate ambiance in mid- and long-term periods in the future.