Influence of atrium on air conditioning cooling load of buildings

Taking a building with the atrium connected to the cloister of each storey as a study object, adopts the multizone model method to partition the whole building and analyses the influence of the atrium on the total cooling load of the building and the cooling load of each storey through simulating hourly cooling load of buildings with different orientations and different atrium heights with Energy Plus software. The results show that the cooling load of each storey increases with the increase of stories, especially at the top two stories; the influence of atrium only occurs in the cloister of each storey, the farther corridor would not be affected; the total cooling load of the east-west orientated building with an atrium is larger than that of the north-south orientated building.