الفهرس 
THERMAL COMFORT&NATURAL VENTILATION IN HOT CLIMATEOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The great interest of the double skin facade (DSF) innovation has been increasing worldwide. Despite its advantages and positivity that have been studied and focused on through the past years, as the main force of the naturally ventilated double glazed office buildings implemented in hot arid climates system is provided by the natural ventilation sources. DSF layers can be overheated during summer due to the coincidence of high outside temperatures, solar gains and internal heat gains. Although DSF system were originally constructed to deal passively with this climate conditions, now DSF buildings are plagued with air conditioning units resulting a more energy consumption that needed for maintaining acceptable internal thermal comfort limits.
After the literature review, built examples and simulation study, the research came up with a better understanding of the strategies for optimizing the DSF configurations in hot arid climates. One of those strategies is hybrid ventilation technique. This innovation system was tested in order to enhance DSF thermal performance, reducing the count on cooling load that leads to more energy consumption and to achieve acceptable indoor environment that is suitable and appropriate to be applied within the local climate of Cairo. This was encouraged by the lack of comprehensive studies concerning the existing DSF buildings in Egypt.
The present work specifically studied and analyzed the airflow characteristics in a DSF cavity using ANSYS fluent simulation program, in order to improve DSF performance in reducing heat gains loads accurse on the internal skin facade surface during hot summer days, by altering different DSF parameters which have impact on thermal behavior of the system, and explore the implementation of the hybrid ventilation technique with these parameters to reach thermal comfort zone within the DSF cavity.
The research revealed that cavity width and upper cavity outlet opening configurations (opening height and orientation) have main effect on airflow patterns of the DSF cavity and therefore on its thermal behavior.
An exhaust fan was used in the cavity as an engine for the hybrid ventilation technique. It accelerates the airflow patterns inside the DSF cavity, subsequently, enhancing the air distribution and air speed. However, examining the thermal behavior of a hybrid ventilation technique within a natural ventilated DSF building still a questionable and a complex case that has many variables needs to be controlled and also to be more tested and analyzed with a full size case studies.