Use of ventilated solar screen window in warm climate

In the building facade, window glazing is one major element contributing to the space thermal load. Lots of work has been done on developing advanced glazing systems that are energy efficient under various climatic conditions. One new concept is the ventilated solar screen window. In this paper, the possible use of this new concept in the warm climate is discussed. A numerical model of a ventilated window system was developed and this was extended to model additional four window configurations. The heat flow was then analyzed for office hours based on the TMY weather data of Hong Kong. The simulation results indicate that better saving can be achieved with the use of ventilated window in summer, in which the outdoor air is induced as the ventilating air stream. In winter, the internal thermal load is high enough to counteract the heat loss through the building envelope. Hence in the warm climatic region, the reversible mechanism is not required for the ventilated window to switch between the summer and winter operation mode. This can save the window construction cost as well as the labor cost for the seasonal changeover. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.