Night cooling attracts growing interest. However, building designers still hesitate to apply night cooling because of the important but hard-to-predict convective heat transfer by night. This heat transfer mechanism depends on the driving force, fluid motion and heat transfer surface and, thus, on the room/system design. Unfortunately, studies addressing this for night cooling regimes are scarce. In response, this study, held in a PASLINK cell, investigates how the ventilative cooling rate, thermal mass and the supply/exhaust configuration affect the convective heat transfer. The analysis is based on airflow data, such as temperature and velocity, and the related convective heat flux. The results indicate the air supply/exhaust configuration is particularly important in case of heterogeneously distributed thermal mass. Next to it, correlations should not be used when the setup and the convection regime differ a lot from those of the corresponding experiments
