Improving Building Fabric for Energy Efficiency by Applying Passive Cooling Strategies.: Towards environmental school building in hot arid climate

The demands for cooling in non-domestic buildings are rising throughout the world. This paper is concerned about the environmental performance of primary schools in hot climate, which affect the pupils’ health, education and productivity. The study focuses on the thermal comfort within classrooms and the improvement of the building fabric by provision of a passive cooling system, as well as other passive ways that improve the classroom’s thermal performance. It is common for school classrooms often to have poor thermal comfort and poor indoor air quality (IAQ. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations have been performed in order to examine the behaviour of the cooling wall system in reducing the effect of outside air temperature under different wind velocities in the summer period. Furthermore, different reductions in heat flux with air velocities have been examined by comparing the performance of the wall fabric system, both with and without passive cooling, and with the same geometry and the same physical characteristics and parameters. The results demonstrated that the proposed passive cooling, in conjunction with outdoor air, could significantly reduce the temperature and enhance the thermal comfort and ventilation inside the classrooms. The performance of the natural wall ventilation with passive cooling system is an improvement in terms of cooling the classroom compared with the non-passive cooling wall system, since it allows the peak air temperature to decrease the temperature inside the classroom zone from 35-44C° range to just 26-22C° (5–18% to 50–61%) compared with peak temperature at 46-48C°