Experimental Investigation of Roof Top Solar Chimney for Natural Ventilation

Roof top solar chimney function to create natural ventilation of buildings. It is a solar driven device which induces buoyancy force through the chimney channel to updraft the air out of the building. The design parameter of the rooftop solar chimney would affect the ventilation performance. This research has been carried out experimentally and by computational simulation and focused on evaluating the system performance at various design configuration and operational condition. There are 3 different designs that are compared; first design is the basic rooftop solar chimney which contain absorber plate, room’s air outlet and total air outlet, second design is the basic rooftop solar chimney with additional of ambient air inlet and third design is the basic rooftop solar chimney with extra absorber plate. Experiment is carried out to measure the performance of these three different designs in turn. The parameters that had been measured include the solar radiation, the air velocity of each air apertures, the temperature of the absorber plates, and the temperature of air inlet and outlet of each air apertures. Simulation has also been done to compare the performance for these designs using software name “Energy2d”. Experiment and Simulation Results is gathered and analysed.