Assessment of natural ventilation within buildings located on hot temperate and mild-temperate regions

This work presents an energy assessment of the natural ventilation performance within buildings located on both hot-temperate and mild-temperate conditions such as the existing along the central region of Mexico. With the assistance of a coupled thermal airflow simulation program, simulations are run without and with natural ventilation, respectively. Thereby, the consumption of air-conditioning presented in this region is validated with data from literature when natural ventilation is not applied. Results show that when natural ventilation is used thermal comfort is achieved more than 90% of the assessed time. Therefore, the cooling demand supplied by air-conditioning could be virtually avoided, especially when the building has high thermal capacity, feature presented on a great part of the building stock. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under he CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the CENTRO CONGRESS INTERNAZIONALE SRL