Reducing energy consumption from air conditioning in Iraq

Author Hayder.m.Khan Supervisor : Dr Gregory Lane-Serff & Dr Jonathan Dewsbury

Introduction
Many cities in the southern hemisphere suffer from the heat island phenomenon, where their temperature is higher than the surrounding area. This situation results from factors like decreasing vegetation areas. The consequence of this phenomena leads to an increase in the use of air-conditioning systems to achieve thermal comfort inside buildings. This exacerbates the problem due to the consumption of more energy to operate those systems which causes more air pollution and discharges a lot of heat as a side effect. This pushes scholars and engineers around the world to search for means to control the temperature in buildings by using passive techniques. Passive cooling method uses natural resource like wind, geothermal mass etc. to modify the inside temperature. A good example for this problem is Baghdad city (capital of Iraq Republic), figure (1), where it records elevated ambient temperature during most of the year days (45 oC) and the modern buildings are built according to the western architecture which is more suitable for cold areas .This makes the demand for electrical energy greater than supply and pushes Baghdadis to use private generators to compensate for the shortage in energy supply. However, the outputs of the generators' exhaust causes the pollution particles in the environment of Bagdad to be ten times higher than the acceptable level in United States.This causes serious health problems for Baghdad residents.

Figure 3.Arial view over a traditional city.

The current research

The current research compares the thermal performance between modern and traditional houses by using EnergyPlus Software and found that there is a reduction in cooling energy of 34 % when using traditional house. Most of the reduction is due to the shading effect of the courtyard house. Further reduction can be achieved by using natural ventilation during the time with low outdoor temperature (e.g. Night time) and this shown in figure (4). This ventilation is classified as passive cooling method and its called night ventilation.

Figure 4.Cooling power Vs infiltration rate. Figure1. Aerial view of the modern Baghdad city. My research will focus on finding an alternative to the cooling systems by using passive cooling techniques derived from traditional housing in Iraq, which is classified as a courtyard house. The research will study natural ventilation in the courtyard and its relation on the thermal mass capacity of the house. CFD work has been done using STAR CCM+ to predict the flow domain inside the courtyard house. The simulation includes the effect of many factors like the aspect ratio (the ratio between the widths to the height of the courtyard), thermal characteristics of the surfaces around the courtyard, city planning ,etc. A sample from the results is showing in figure (5).This work will be coupled with thermal simulation to calculate the buoyancy effect inside the rooms of the house .The objective of the CFD work is to derive an equation to determine the ventilation rate in such houses where none of the existing equations calculated the ventilation rate accurately .Furthermore additional equations will be derived to find the air velocity inside the rooms and the heat transfer coefficient with walls. Such equations will be useful to measure thermal capacity of night ventilation.

Objectives of the research

1- Reducing the cooling energy by using passive cooling methods. 2- Deriving the mathematical relations that can be used in the design stage of the building to achieve a reduction in the cooling capacity.

Traditional and modern house

Baghdad's city is just few kilometres away from one of the oldest green building (the Hanging Gardens) which was built before 2500 years ago. The ancient builders continued to develop their skills from that time. A good example of their experience in sustainable building is the Baghdadi house. This house is normally a two-storey courtyard house, figure (2), where it usually built side by side without leaving any spaces in masse blocks of buildings. These blocks can be different in size and due to this, the alleyways that connect between them are also different in size, so there are long and wide alleyways for large blocks and small, narrow, closed end and winding alleyways for small groups as shown in figure (3). Figure 2.Courtyard house. Traditional house manipulated the indoor temperature by using many passive cooling techniques like thermal mass with night ventilation, building underground and providing shading by courtyard shape .At that time, there are no formal rules for these skills and its transfer as methods of craftsmanship between different generations. With twenty centuries, the traditional craftsmanship is vanished due to the abundance of electric power and the modern building. However, at the current time there is renewed interest in traditional building and there is more focus in finding the mathematical formulations for the design basis of the traditional house.

Figure 5.Wake interface flow in courtyard with aspect ratio equal to two.

Conclusion
1-Many cities suffer from thermal and air pollution and this is due to many factors. Change of architecture trends is one of them, which make the buildings consume a high percentage of generated energy to maintain thermal comfort. 2-To fix this it is necessary to study passive cooling methods in the indigenous building like courtyard houses and extract the techniques that can be used in the modern houses to reduce cooling energy. 3-The current research focus on one of those techniques which is night ventilation,which depends on ventilation rate and ambient temperature. 4- In recent times there is no relation to calculate the ventilation rate for the courtyard house and this indicate the need to find one. 5- This research will use CFD and thermal simulation to find an equation that can be use to predict the ventilation rate and consequently the thermal capacity of the natural ventilation . 6- The above relation can be useful in the design stage for the building project.

School of Mechanical, Aerospace & Civil Engineering Postgraduate Research Conference, PGR-MACE11