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In the hot regions (like the tropical belt), a significant part of dwellings (existing or new) are not equiped with any active cooling system. It has been demonstrated that to be able to keep an acceptable thermal comfort, it is necessary, beyond an insulated walling and external movable shading in front of glazed areas, to have an efficient night wind driven cooling. To be efficient the air flow at night should be in the range of 10 Air Change per Hour (ACH). Only intuitive design is not sufficient. CFD tools are necessary to analyse the wind patterns, outside and acros the buildings. Commercial CFD tools are very expensive and therefore mostly out of reach for many consulting firms or architectural offices. Public domain CFD have been available since the 2000’s but their interface and their use has kept them mostly out of reach for practitioners. At the same time the importation possibilities may not correspond to the regular architectural drawings. The Airflow for Buildings CFD (ABCFD) tool is an early design decision tool that calculates the natural or assisted ventilation potential of buildings. It is based on a robust simulation engine (OpenFOAM) and has a user-friendly graphical user interface.
Automatic meshing generation
Early simulation of wind patterns around buildings based on 2D dxf drawings in a very short simulation time (few minutes for most cases) with special importing help features.
Reading building outlines, setting heights, selecting wind velocity profile and direction at night for a given location, and generating a base case simulation.
Alternatively draw buildings with openings, zoning inside the software interface, or combination of both options.
Visualize result slices, streamlines, velocity arrows, clipping planes, threshold, and building surface color
Allowing easy comparison of different building orientations and locations in a project at an early stage.
Simulate internal air flows, wind driven and/or with auxiliary fan
Calculate air flow across openings
Generate pdf reports as defined by the user
Account for resistances like mosquito nets
Include axial fans in case the air flow is not sufficient despite testing of various wind driven strategies
Assess various innovative strategies
