Ventilative Cooling potential tool User guide - Version 1.0

The new initiatives and regulation towards low energy buildings forces designers to exploit the cooling potential of the climate to reduce the overheating occurrence and to improve thermal comfort indoors. Climate analysis is particularly useful at early design stages to support decision making towards cost-effective ventilative cooling solutions. The first step to design ventilative cooling is to analyse the climate potential, in other words the natural forces that drives natural ventilation (outdoor temperature, humidity and wind velocities and direction). As buildings with different use patterns, envelope characteristics and internal loads level react differently to the external climate condition, the climate analysis cannot abstract from building characteristics and use. The ventilative cooling potential tool (VC tool) was developed within International Energy Agency (IEA) Annex 62 project with the aim to assess the potential effectiveness of ventilative cooling strategies by taking into account also building envelope thermal properties, occupancy patterns, internal gains and ventilation needs.