Results
The final results document the use of convective air flow to cool a space and the rate it takes to remove the hot air within the space. By having the cans heated either through boiling water or placing them in the oven, it shows that it removes the hot air faster and cools down a space faster than using cold cans and regular means of ventilation.
Conclusion and Future Steps
Testing out the convective air flow by just using a box made of wood, acrylic and cans has been an informative way of understanding how hot air can be sucked out of an environment through the use of having a cooler breeze enter the structure while the other end is heated to create a vacuum. This testing method has shown a new way of being able to visually track the movement of air without having to own a Schlieren imaging device, a device used to visualize the density in gases. By turning the images recorded into black and white and turning the curve settings in Photoshop to "color negative" it was able to focus on the movement of the fog within the structure.
Future steps or improvement that could be done for this experiment is to better integrate the fan used to simulate breeze entering a building. Sometimes the fan would have to be picked up to get turned on or turned off allowing for different results at times. Depending on the fan setting, sometimes it'll start blowing way too hard at the beginning until the setting is changed to a slower speed. Other steps could be creating other variations of sizes and shapes in order to test what size allows for faster removal of air with a solar chimney.
Future steps or improvement that could be done for this experiment is to better integrate the fan used to simulate breeze entering a building. Sometimes the fan would have to be picked up to get turned on or turned off allowing for different results at times. Depending on the fan setting, sometimes it'll start blowing way too hard at the beginning until the setting is changed to a slower speed. Other steps could be creating other variations of sizes and shapes in order to test what size allows for faster removal of air with a solar chimney.
Design Proposal
According to psychometric chart data for El Salvador, natural ventilation is a key element in creating a cooler space and in most cases, some of the rural housing in El Salvador do not use many forms of natural ventilation in order to achieve thermal comfort. By scaling this project up to a bigger scale, cans could be upcycled and stacked as an array to replicate a solar chimney. Also large oil drums could be upcycled instead of utilizing too many cans as they are both able to retain heat.