Heating and Ventilation Performance of a Solar Chimney Designed in a Low-Cost Ecological Home

The Mediterranean climate requires both winter and summer performance from a building. Construction costs, the environmental impact of construction, energy demand of the building, occupants' health, and thermal comfort are a few of the issues that need consideration in the design of a low-cost ecological home. A solar chimney is a passive design strategy that can be used both as a passive heating and a natural ventilation device. This study aims to design and investigate the heating and ventilation performance of a solar chimney in winter and its overheating risk in summer in a low-cost ecological home designed on the rural site of Izmir, Turkey. This paper performs a comprehensive two-dimensional, numerical computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of the designed solar chimney. The time-dependent transient analysis conducted in the winter and a hot summer day show that solar irradiation is the major driving force in chimney performance. The contribution of the solar chimney to space heating is significant in winter since the average mean temperature inside the chimney is around 44 degrees C besides the chimney does not cause overheating in summer. The ecological home and solar chimney are under construction and experimental works will be conducted to further this study.