Trial / Demo
Specialising in the engineering of buildings in tropical environments including the Indian Ocean and Africa, Integrale Ingenierie used IES Virtual Environment (IESVE) software to verify and optimise a pioneering natural ventilation strategy for a new 600-student secondary school in Mamoudzou, Mayotte.
In Mayotte's tropical climate, natural ventilation is difficult to achieve without the right expertise. INTEGRALE Ingénierie applied bioclimatic design principles throughout, not only orienting the building to capture prevailing winds and thermal breezes, but also arranging its form around a courtyard to generate projected shading across the façades. These façades were highly permeable, and incorporated suspended gardens to allow air to flow freely through the building. Finally, compressed earth blocks (CEBs) on the courtyard-facing exteriors provided thermal mass and time-lag performance, moderating internal temperatures passively.
Designing for comfort in a tropical climate
To validate how this strategy would perform as designed under real climatic conditions, INTEGRALE Ingénierie used IESVE to model the building's airflow, thermal behaviour, and energy performance in detail. External CFD analysis via MicroFlo was used to assess airflow performance and size building openings in relation to prevailing winds and thermal breezes. And those results were transferred into MacroFlo to simulate natural ventilation and inter-zone convective airflow within the building, with comfort rates confirmed against the Givoni bioclimatic chart, which provided a rigorous, evidence-based foundation for the ventilation strategy.
An integrated workflow from solar analysis to energy performance
A key advantage of using IESVE is how integrated all our software is. SunCast was used to carry out shading analysis, accounting for surrounding obstructions and solar protection devices, and to calculate the associated solar gains across the envelope. ApacheHVAC then provided dynamic assessment of energy consumption, analysis of heat gains from building operation, system sizing, and associated energy use, giving the team a complete picture of how the building would perform across the full year to enable targeted optimisation before construction.
"The ability to move between external CFD, natural ventilation modelling, shading analysis, and dynamic energy simulation within a single integrated platform reduced the complexity of a technically demanding brief and kept results consistent across disciplines. For projects in tropical climates where natural ventilation is the cornerstone of both comfort and energy strategy, MacroFlo in particular, provides a capability that is difficult to replicate elsewhere – enabling air-change rates and comfort outcomes to be simulated efficiently and with confidence."
Laure Demonchaux, Head of Building & Environmental Quality Department
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Client: Rectorat de Mayotte
Architects: COCO Architecture and GRZ Mayotte
Engineering consultancy: INTEGRALE Ingénierie
