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Persian wind towers, badgirs, are passive building cooling systems that use nature to provide comfort to people in hot-dry regions. They catch fresh air and channel it down to cool the internal spaces. Sometimes they perform as ventilators and conduct the pleasant air from the courtyard on the ground floor up to the top of the wind tower. In this paper, construction technology, typology based on location and number of intakes, cooling performance, and seismic behaviour of badgirs are described. Wind towers in Kashan, Central Iran, are studied for their cooling functioning and structural behaviour against earthquakes. Four different heights for the wind towers are considered. The effects of wind tower height, wind orientation and wind velocity on mass flow and temperature in wind towers are presented.
badgir, cooling performance, earthquake, mass flow, passive system, Persian wind towers, temperature, typology
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