HVAC - Natural Ventilation Practices and Principles

In HVAC - Natural Ventilation Practices and Principles, you'll learn ...

• What is natural ventilation and how it can be incorporated into a building design for energy savings
• Challenges associated with using natural ventilation for a building
• How to determine ventilation rate using contaminant control, heat generation and air change methods
• The impact of site selection and building orientation on natural ventilation

Overview

Preview a portion of this course before purchasing it.

Credit: 3 PDH

Length: 45 pages

Natural ventilation refers to the process of exchanging warm building air for cooler outside air without the use of energy-consuming mechanical devices, such as fans and air conditioners. With an increased awareness of the cost and environmental impacts of energy use, natural ventilation has become an increasingly attractive method for providing acceptable indoor environmental quality and maintaining a healthy, comfortable, productive indoor climate. In favorable climates, natural ventilation can be used as an alternative to air-conditioning systems, saving 10%-30% of total energy consumption.

Natural ventilation is not always as simple as just providing multiple operable windows in a building. Wind patterns specific to the site and the building design and its arrangement play a vital role. Care must be taken to avoid having a wind tunnel effect in areas of the building. Excessive wind indoors can obviously provide an undesirable effect, such as in offices where paperwork is lying around on desks.

This 3-hour course outlines the basic principles underlying natural ventilation, and explains how best to proceed with a specific design. It is not intended to be a textbook of natural ventilation; the main aim is to help engineers understand how to incorporate natural ventilation into the design of their buildings.

This course is aimed at Mechanical and HVAC engineers, Architects, Building designers, Energy Auditors, Facility managers, Operational & Maintenance Personnel, and others who are interested in learning about the methodology, benefits and challenges associated with natural ventilation.

Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained

This course teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:

• How natural ventilation is different from mechanical ventilation
• The purposes and appropriate applications for natural ventilation
• Wind driven ventilation and the factors that determine the efficiency of wind ventilation
• What is stack driven ventilation and what factors enhance the stack effect
• What is infiltration and how building porosity affects infiltration
• General guidelines that should be followed when designing for natural ventilation
• Design standards and codes that govern the design of natural ventilation
• Common design tools and software that are available for analyzing the natural ventilation systems

Certificate of Completion

You will be able to immediately print a certificate of completion after passing a multiple-choice quiz consisting of 20 questions. PDH credits are not awarded until the course is completed and quiz is passed.