Natural Ventilation Enhancement of a Roof Solar Chimney with Wind-Induced Channel

Abstract

A novel roof solar chimney with wind-induced channel was designed herein to augment indoor natural ventilation under combined action of wind and solar energy. Compared with the traditional solar chimney, the new rooftop solar chimney improves the air flow due to the wind-induced channel. The effects of channel width ratio, chimney inclination at different outdoor wind speeds on the natural ventilation performance of the roof solar chimney were studied by numerical simulation. Finite-volume method was used for the numerical calculation. It was found that the trends of ventilation rate are different when the channel widths increase. The mass flow rate of the new structure increases with the increase in the inclination angle. When the inclination angles increase from 30° to 90°, the ventilation rate increases by 212% for U = 1.0 m·s−1, 166% for U = 2.0 m·s−1, and 127% for U = 3.0 m·s−1 under the condition of and the solar radiation I = 600 W·m−2.