Computational Analysis of Wind-Driven Natural Ventilation in a Two Sided Rectangular Wind Catcher

Wind catchers are natural ventilation systems attached to buildings in order to ventilate the indoor air. In order to design and evaluate the performance of wind catchers, as a natural ventilation system, an accurate CFD simulation of indoor airflow and outdoor wind flow is fundamental. It is widely known that there are a large number of computational parameters influencing CFD simulations. Consequently, comprehensive sensitivity analyses of the effect of these parameters on the simulation results are essential to provide guidance for the evaluation of a CFD study. According to the literature review carried out, a wide generic sensitivity study for the CFD simulation of natural ventilation in wind catchers is highly required. This paper presents a series of 3D steady RANS simulations for a generic isolated two-sided wind catcher attached to a room subjected to wind directions ranging from 0 degrees to 90 degrees with an interval of 15 degrees. The CFD simulations are validated with detailed wind tunnel experiments. The influence of an extensive range of computational parameters is explored in this paper, including the resolution of the computational grid, the size of the computational domain, the turbulence model and the order of the discretization scheme.