Comparison of Downdraught and Up Draft Passive Air Conduction Systems (PACS) in a Winery Building

Ádám László Katona,István Kistelegdi,István Ervin Háber

doi:10.3390/buildings11060259

Abstract

A huge portion of energy consumption in buildings comes from heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. Numerous previous works assessed the potential of natural ventilation compared to mechanical ventilation and proved their justification on the field. Nevertheless, it is a major difficulty to collect enough information from the literature to make decisions between different natural ventilation solutions with a given situation and boundary conditions. The current study tests the passive air conduction system (PACS) variations in the design phase of a medium-sized new winery’s cellar and production hall in Villány, Hungary. A computational fluid dynamics simulation based comparative analysis enabled to determine the differences in updraft (UD) and downdraught (DD) PACS, whereby the latter was found to be more efficient. While the DD PACS performed an air change range of 1.02 h−1 to 5.98 h−1, the UD PACS delivered −0.25 h−1 to 12.82 h−1 air change rate. The ventilation performance of the DD version possessed lower amplitudes, but the distribution was more balanced under different wind incident angles, thus this version was chosen for construction. It could be concluded that the DD PACS provides a more general applicability for natural ventilation in moderate climates and in small to medium scale industry hall domains with one in- and one outlet.

Highlights

One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is to avoid the irreversible rate of global warming, and to restrain the harmful tendencies which are responsible for it
Rong et al [13] observed a similar case of a dairy cow building with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, concluding that even 60% differences can occur in the air change (ACH), depending on the wind incident angles to the façade openings
Though in scientific studies multiple valid building natural ventilation (NV) solutions results were obtained about their effective accomplishments, most of the recent studies usually juxtapose NV with MV systems

Summary

Introduction

One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is to avoid the irreversible rate of global warming, and to restrain the harmful tendencies which are responsible for it. The temperature was stable in the underground cellars in summer and winter periods, and the chimneys were suitable to extract the stale air without changing drastically the internal relative humidity or temperature and altering negatively the maturation of wine These studies provide promising results to design a PACS with wind towers in modern wineries as well. In the case of dense neighborhood in greater distance (Site B), both UD and DD PACS perform stronger than in Site A (lower neighborhood density in closer distance) in the cellar and hall spaces, showing that proximity of neighbor buildings and objects—even in weaker density—can influence the ventilation rates These results correlate with previous works [13,43,53], examining and proving significant effects of neighbor objects on the NV performance

Limitations

Conclusions

Findings

United Nations Framwork Convention on Climate Change