Effect of Natural Ventilation on the Thermal Performance of a Residential Building in a Hot Semi-Arid Climate

The potential to exploit natural ventilation and develop specific ventilation strategies for the microclimate of a residential building was conducted. The studied house is located at the UM6P campus in the Green City of Benguerir (70 km from Marrakech to the North), mostly built using local materials with high thermal inertia and integrates many other passive and hybrid systems. This paper has the goal of demonstrating the specific design purposes to serve the night ventilation in such harsh climatic conditions like the one of Marrakech region (Benguerir city) and whether this specific design can be a model to follow to take advantage of night ventilation or not. The results show that night ventilation reduces the operative temperature of the house in a prominent way. Indeed, the GND floor night ventilation decreased its average operative temperature by about 2 degrees C; while for the first floor, this temperature is lowered by around 3 degrees C. It is concluded that natural ventilation is an interesting passive technique for air cooling leading to a significant reduction, of up to 27%, of the house's annual cooling load.