Measurement of Natural Ventilation Rate in a Japanese Residential Building

It is difficult to design a naturally ventilated indoor environment because there is insufficient knowledge to evaluate the effect of the natural ventilation space quantitatively. Especially, natural ventilation rate is not yet fully understood. In this paper, the properties of natural ventilation with large openings are examined mainly from the results of measuring ventilation rate. This measurement analysis shows that the resistance of the interior doors is large and the ventilation rate is almost caused by air exchange through a single opening when the interior doors are closed (single-sided ventilation). By contrast a high ventilation rate is observed when the interior doors are opened (giving cross ventilation). This paper also identifies which factors influence the ventilation rate through the large openings.