Abstract Recent studies have shown that surface and gaseous contaminant interactions may play an important role in indoor air quality. Modeling is an important tool to improve our knowledg...

This study describes the work on the development of climatic applicability maps of downdraught cooling in Europe; this work is presented as an extension of the work developed in the PHDC project, 2008–2010. The approach is based on a set of maps, which are based on two related climatic characteristics: dry bulb temperature–wet bulb temperature (DBT−WBT) and 25°C−WBT, and in the cooling requirements for each location. The meaning of the climatic characteristics will be explained in the text; as the first climatic characteristic represents the potential of using the evaporative systems to cool the air, and the second one shows the potential of cooling the building with a system that theoretically could supply the air in wet bulb conditions. The potential opportunity of using different types of downdraught cooling solutions, such as passive downdraught evaporative cooling and hybrid downdraught cooling, as an alternative to conventional air conditioning was assessed for different climate regions. A detailed version of a part of the Europe map will be done in order to take into account the particularities of a country like Spain. This set of maps will show the same parameters but with more resolution. Finally, six cities representing major climatic regions were selected for climatic analysis. This resulted in the identification of three climate zones for downdraught cooling application in Europe, and the suggestion of appropriate design strategies for each one of them.