Identifying the most influential parameter affecting natural ventilation performance in high-rise high-density residential buildings

Natural ventilation contributes to comfort, reduction of energy use for air conditioning and improving indoor air quality in high-rise high-density residential buildings. Measures to improve its performance should be of interest to the general public. Among factors that have an impact on natural ventilation performance of residential units, openings configuration is perhaps the most investigated. Much research work has been done on investigating the impact of different configuration parameters, but most previous studies are focused on only one impact parameter. In this study, computational fluid dynamics simulations are conducted for evaluating the combined impact of different configuration parameters so as to identify the configuration parameter that has the highest impact on natural ventilation performance of residential units. Statistical analysis of simulation results revealed that amongst the five studied parameters (i.e. ventilation mode, window type, orientation, window-to-wall ratio and living room area), natural ventilation performance, represented by mean age of air, is most affected by the ventilation mode adopted (i.e. cross or single-sided ventilation).