Transevaporative cooling performance of a three-sided wind catcher

A wind catcher is a structure used for capturing wind at higher elevations and directing it to the desired locations for cooling. A down-draft evaporative wind catcher uses the principle of evaporative cooling to provide passive cooling as well as natural ventilation. The present paper presents the performance of a three-sided wind catcher at Masdar city, subjected to mist injection. The 45 m tall wind catcher is modelled for different wind speeds ranging from 1-5 m/s using computational fluid dynamics. The numerical model accounts for Eulerian-Lagrangian formulation. Equations of continuity, momentum and energy along with realizable k-ε turbulence model are employed to calculate the flow field. Droplet evaporation in discrete phase model is used for tracking the liquid water mists. The results demonstrate that the wind catcher performance is greatly influenced by the external wind speed. Higher wind speed resulted in higher rate of evaporation and lower air temperatures. The density, water vapour mass fraction and the relative humidity increases as the air flow travel downwards to the wind catcher exit. While the temperature decreases significantly in the downward direction of the wind catcher. The present study shows the promise of using the computational models in analysing and optimizing the design and performance of the wind catcher.