Natural air conditioning design

Natural air conditioning design is a sustainable strategy to meet the need of ensuring indoor environmental quality, by helping to establish indoor temperatures and humidity levels within acceptable values and guaranteeing an adequate natural ventilation flow rate. The adjective ‘natural’ is to indicate that, according to the holistic perspective of sustainability, having indoor environmental quality conditions must necessarily be accomplished through passive strategies, so as to minimize the contribution of machines powered by pollutant sources. In this way the three sustainable pillars will be simultaneously met: the social, by promoting the well-being and the satisfaction of basic needs; the environmental, by preserving the biological quality; the economic, through the exploitation of natural, free and renewable resources. Natural air conditioning design can be metaphorically defined as a dialogue: between human living and comfort needs, on the one side, and the natural climatic constrains on the other. The natural conditioned (or free running) building is the mediator who tries to reconcile the positions of the contenders.