A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF EFFECT OF THE GREEN FEATURE - WING WALLS ON NATURAL VENTILATION IN BUILDINGS

There is growing consciousness of the environmental performance of buildings in Hong Kong. The Buildings Department, the Lands Department and the Planning Department of the Hong Kong Government issued the first of a series of joint practice notes [1] to promote the construction of green and innovative buildings. Green features are architectural features used to mitigate migration of noise and various air-borne pollutants and to moderate the transport of heat, air and transmission of daylight from outside to indoor environment in an advantageous way. This joint practice note sets out the incentives to encourage the industry in Hong Kong to incorporate the use of green features in building development. The use of green features in building design not only improves the environmental quality, but also reduces the consumption of non-renewable energy used in active control of indoor environment. Larger window openings in the walls of a building may provide better natural ventilation. However, it also increases the penetration of direct solar radiation into indoor environment. The use of wing wall, one of the green features, is an alternative to create effective natural ventilation. This paper therefore presents a preliminary numerical study of its ventilation performance using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The numerical results will be compared with the results of the wind tunnel experiments of Givoni.