Conference article

Passive design strategy is an important approach to reduce energy consumption of a building such as improving indoor thermal comfort through enhanced natural ventilation performance. This is crucial in achieving a more sustainable building especially for a tall high density residential development where energy consumption is huge. This paper looks into the potential of high-rise residential buildings to utilize abundant naturally available prevailing wind by mean of passive design strategy. Its objective is to investigate the potential to improve the ventilation performance of a single-sided ventilation strategy of high-rise residential buildings by introducing a series of balconies on their façades. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was used as a tool for investigation. Since CFD requires a validation process to investigate its reliability; existing wind tunnel experiments and empirical models were used in the validation process. This study found that an appropriate combination of balcony configurations and single-sided ventilation strategy could improve indoor ventilation performance of high-rise residential buildings; however; incorrect combination could further reduce the ventilation performance of an already inefficient ventilation strategy. Therefore; understanding the concept of single-sided ventilation strategy is crucial; and application of appropriate tools such as CFD is important to ensure ventilation performance optimization is achieved.

Single-sided ventilation; Balcony; High-rise residential building; CFD