Numerical modelling of structural cooling in Mediterranean climate

Despite the growing interest in recent times, buildings passive cooling in the Mediterranean area is a large topic that has not yet been fully explored. In the assessment of structural cooling, that is a passive strategy based on natural ventilation and thermal masses cooling, a dynamic analysis is required in order to investigate the inertial response of buildings. For this reason, it seems interesting to investigate the relationship between simplified physical–mathematical models (multi-zone), currently very popular, and finite element numerical models (CFD), which solve the equations of thermofluid dynamics and return a detailed response from the scientific and computational point of view. This paper aims to highlight the limitations and potentialities of these models, in order to evaluate possible methods of integration of both approaches and related software, in terms of an explicitly temporal–spatial multiscale approach, to obviate each other’s shortcomings while providing an accurate evaluation of the inertial response and its effect on the buildings energy efficiency.