Ventilation potential of an absorber-partitioned air channel solar chimney for diurnal use under Mexican climate conditions

•A SC-AP under Mexican climate conditions presents a high ventilation potential for diurnal use.•A SC-AP located in Merida is able to extract up 11.4 ACH in a residential house of 10 m2.•A SC-AP is able to adequately ventilate a classroom of 54 m3 located in Merida.•The SC-AP reaches up 40.1% of average thermal efficient in July. This research presents a thermal evaluation of an absorber-partitioned air channel solar chimney (SC-AP) to determine its feasibility as a building ventilation system in a warm-humid weather. Hourly climatic data from the coldest and the warmest days of each month of 2014 were used to assess the behavior of the SC-AP in Mérida, México. A numerical code based on the Finite Volume Method was developed to evaluate the ventilation potential of the SC-AP. The results indicate that the average mass flow rate of the coldest day is greater than the one corresponding to the warmest day in most of the months; therefore, even under the worst conditions of the year, the SC-AP extracted an average mass flow rate of 0.0832 kg/s. In addition, when the SC-AP is attached to a building, it is able to generate between 7.9 and 11.4 ACH for a residential bedroom of 27 m3 and more than 3.5 ACH for a classroom of 54 m3 during the hours with solar irradiance along the year, those values comply with the requirements recommended by ASHRAE.