This paper investigates the impact of spatial composition on the effectiveness of passive cooling by natural ventilation in a comparative study of the conical roofed Harran houses in Turkey and a passive solar home in the Midwest of the United States. While the projects are distinct and are situated in two extreme climate zones (hot and arid and continental humid) both projects have in common open variable configurations of multiple interconnected spaces. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using OpenFoam were used to investigate the fundamental airflow characteristics and the resulting interior temperature and velocity profiles. The simulations were initialized as well as validated with measured field data. Subsequently, we tested the impact of the interconnected spatial composition of the buildings on their cooling potentials. This was accomplished by simulating variations of the spatial connections with reduced flow path connectivity compared to the original validated cases. Preliminary results regarding changes in temperature and air velocity show higher temperatures and lower velocities in the less connected cell-like spaces and indicate the importance of spatial connectivity for effective cooling by natural ventilation based on variable interaction of vents and flow path.This conference proceeding is published as Ulrike Passe, Mirka Deza, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Shan He, Kyle Vansice, Songzhe Xu2, An Integrated Experimental-Computational Investigation of Connected Spaces as Natural Ventilation Typologies. at the 2016 Proceedings of the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design. London United Kingdom, May 16-18, 2016; Session 1; 59-66. Posted with permission.</p
