Passive cooling of buildings by using integrated earth to air heat exchanger and solar chimney

Abstract

Passive cooling is being employed as a low-energy consuming technique to remove undesirable interior heat from a building in the hot seasons. There are numerous ways to promote this cooling technique, and in the present study the use of solar chimney (SC) together with earth to air heat exchanger (EAHE) is introduced. Consequently, theoretical analyses have been conducted in order to investigate the cooling and ventilation in a solar house through combined solar chimney and underground air channel. The finding shows that the solar chimney can be perfectly used to power the underground cooling system during the daytime, without any need to electricity. Moreover, this system with a proper design may also provide a thermally comfortable indoor environment for a large number of hours in the scorching summer days. Based on the required indoor thermal comfort conditions, the numbers of required SCs and EAHEs are calculated and some features of such a system is presented. It is widely expected that the proposed concept is useful enough to be incorporated with a stand-alone or a cluster of buildings especially in some favorable climates.