Demands for energy savings, thermal and visual comfort and a high-tech image for new buildingenvelopes can be met with a Double Skin Façade (DSF). These kinds of building envelopes are widelyencouraged, proposed and increasingly designed by architects. Naturally ventilated DSFs seem veryinteresting from an energy point of view, but a good design is crucial to improve the energy savings andthe proper operation of the system. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can play an important role inevaluating and improving the thermal behaviour of a DSF. This paper shows, through a sensitivityanalysis, a good strategy for carrying out a CFD simulation of this special building envelope. In this workthe validations of the results are based on experimental data from the literature.The paper provides a discussion that highlights which factors are important in the simulation, andwhich increase model complexity without improving the prediction capacity. The results show that, fora DSF characterized by a prevalent bidirectional flow, the additional effort required to make a 3D model isnot justified by a significant improvement of the results. This work shows also that the accuracy can beimproved by modelling outdoor ambient. The performance of k-ε and k-w, the two most commonly usedturbulent models for simulating the naturally ventilated DSF is evaluated.
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