In buildings with exposed internal thermal mass, natural ventilation (NV) can be used for nighttime pre-cooling (NVC) of the building for the next day. In many cases, these natural cooling systems are used in combination with conventional mechanical cooling systems (an approach known as hybrid cooling). The use of these systems is still limited, in part as a result of the lack of field studies that measure actual cooling load reduction that can be obtained when using an NVC system.

This paper presents the first measured energy savings due to NVC in a non-residential building. This study had two objectives: measure daytime cooling load reduction due to NVC in the previous night; and validate thermal and airflow simulation tools that are used in design of NV and NVC systems. The results are encouraging: comparison of the cooling demand of similar days with and without NVC in the previous night shows that, on average, the NVC system reduces the daytime cooling load by 27%. The dynamic thermal simulations were able to predict the cooling load reduction, internal air temperature and bulk airflow rates with average errors of 1.7%, 11.2% and 14.1%, respectively.

在内部热质量暴露的建筑物中，第二天可以将自然通风（NV）用于建筑物的夜间预冷（NVC）。在许多情况下，这些自然冷却系统与常规机械冷却系统结合使用（一种称为混合冷却的方法）。这些系统的使用仍然受到限制，部分原因是缺乏实地研究的结果，该研究测量了使用NVC系统时可获得的实际冷却负荷降低。

本文介绍了在非住宅建筑中由于NVC首次测得的节能量。这项研究有两个目标：测量前一天晚上因NVC造成的白天制冷负荷减少；并验证用于NV和NVC系统设计的热力和气流模拟工具。结果令人鼓舞：将前一天晚上有无NVC的相似日期的制冷需求进行比较，结果表明，平均而言，NVC系统将白天的制冷负荷降低了27％。动态热仿真能够预测平均负载误差分别为1.7％，11.2％和14.1％的冷却负荷降低，内部空气温度和大风量。