Ventilation has been becoming essential since the last decade in modern buildings due to increasing environmental pollution, desire of clean indoor environment, and occupant comfort. Conventional space ventilation strategies rely on mechanical ventilation systems which consume huge amounts of energy in their operation. Passive ventilation strategy is a potential alternative to this and has reduced or no operational cost and energy consumption. Passive ventilation systems based on solar chimneys are naturally driven by solar energy. Since last two decades, research work on this passive ventilation strategy through solar chimney is gaining attraction among researchers. This article presents the overview of outcomes of considerable work taken place in passive ventilation through solar chimney. Experimental and numerical simulation using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are rigorously utilized by the researchers for analysis of various passive ventilation systems. CFD simulations have been used in much research on solar chimney since last few years. However, the experimental works majorly available in literature have been performed using small scale set-up. Previous research works mainly show the design of solar chimneys and their potential in producing air flow in a duct. It is therefore concluded that there is a huge scope of research work on full scale solar chimney system-based ventilation in buildings. This will enable better understanding of passive ventilation strategy which is still not well understood.

PDF (Download Full text)

| Download Citation (XML)