Night cooling

It was mentioned that for night cooling a strategy based on a combination of radiative cooling and natural ventilation was employed. At night, when climatic conditions are favourable (i. e., when ambient temperature is low enough to provide a cooling effect), water is circulated in order to exchange energy between the radiant floors and the radiative panels so that the floor temperature can be brought down and the zone heat gains be dissipated. In the meantime, the motorized dampers in the office zones open to enable night cooling by means of cross flow natural ventilation driven by a set of solar chimneys. In automatic mode, both systems work together depending on schedules and temperature setpoints, but users with supervisor privileges in the SCADA system can manually activate or deactivate any of the systems. Night cooling supposedly works until the early morning, while the ambient temperature and solar radiation are still low enough for natural ventilation and radiative cooling to maintain an adequate thermal comfort inside the building without the need of any active system. However, the weather tends to get warm very quickly in the morning in Almeria so that active cooling system may be required quite soon for indoor conditions to remain acceptable. Nevertheless, it is important to mention that passive cooling techniques always have the priority over other cooling techniques and are used whenever possible in order to minimize energy consumption associated with the operation of the building’s air conditioning systems.