TY - JFULL AU - M. Hossein Ghadiri and Mohd Farid Mohamed and N. Lukman N. Ibrahim PY - 2012/1/ TI - CFD Analysis of Natural Ventilation Behaviour in Four Sided Wind Catcher T2 - International Journal of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering SP - 2725 EP - 2730 VL - 6 SN - 1307-6892 UR - https://publications.waset.org/pdf/9557 PU - World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology NX - Open Science Index 72, 2012 N2 - Wind catchers are traditional natural ventilation systems attached to buildings in order to ventilate the indoor air. The most common type of wind catcher is four sided one which is capable to catch wind in all directions. CFD simulation is the perfect way to evaluate the wind catcher performance. The accuracy of CFD results is the issue of concern, so sensitivity analyses is crucial to find out the effect of different settings of CFD on results. This paper presents a series of 3D steady RANS simulations for a generic isolated four-sided wind catcher attached to a room subjected to wind direction ranging from 0º to 180º with an interval of 45º. The CFD simulations are validated with detailed wind tunnel experiments. The influence of an extensive range of computational parameters is explored in this paper, including the resolution of the computational grid, the size of the computational domain and the turbulence model. This study found that CFD simulation is a reliable method for wind catcher study, but it is less accurate in prediction of models with non perpendicular wind directions. ER -