Electricity is still a requirement for all modern houses and a crucial input for all production operations. Due to the impacts of global warming and the security of the energy supply, appropriate energy regulations are therefore necessary to encourage efficient electricity usage in the residential sector in many countries. Given that the home sector accounts for nearly one-third of all global power consumption, attention should be paid to the characteristics of residential electricity use. (Chen, 2017). Furthermore, humans normally spend up to 80% of their time indoors, the air they breathe indoors must be at a great quality. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), contaminated air quality causes health problems in approximately 40% of building residents globally.
The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of louver opening configuration and relative humidity for natural ventilation of an isolated building. This study contains four different relative humidity settings (20%, 40%, 60% and 80%) with five different opening configurations windward and leeward walls. A middle-middle louver opening configuration was first studied to validate the result with (Kosutova et al., 2019). Each louver opening configuration was simulated using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with RNG k-epsilon turbulence model with enhanced wall treatment. Grid sensitivity analysis and model validation was conducted using previous study to ensure accuracy on findings. From initial analysis, comparison shows good agreement as the results are similar. From the simulation cases, increasing relative humidity for various louver opening configuration does affects the overall temperature distribution in each wall. From the results, the dimensionless flow rate (DFR) in Top-Top Louver opening configuration shows the greatest DFR. This statement have an agreement with recent researches which indicates the Top-Top louver opening configurations has an highest flow rate throughout the building. Furthermore, according to the velocity contour, the top-top and top-bottom opening configurations have a greater air exchange rate at the top of the building, while the bottom-bottom and bottom-top opening configurations have a higher air exchange rate at the bottom of the building. Therefore, this study concludes that opening position with louver plays an important role on the internal airflow and DFR in building natural ventilation.