A Guide to Natural Ventilation Design

About the Book

This book is an attempt to combine all the books, literatures, researches and universities master’s theses available for a shortcut fundamental knowledge to design basic passive or natural ventilation in residential homes. As in-depth studies in passive design will take years of immense work due to so many variables involved, we tried to gather just enough information to provide you the basic working knowledge to start designing your simple naturally ventilated project. We also included our NV study of a high-rise building that was successfully built.

About the Author

Don was born in the island of Cebu and the eldest son of Consorcio V. Manuel, sugar technologist and adviser to the late President Manuel L. Quezon on the Philippine sugar industry. His early education was at Sacred Heart Academy, founded by American and Chinese Jesuit priests displaced in China during the Communist revolution. His pre-engineering was at La Salle College in Bacolod City, now the University of St. La Salle (USLS). He was a guitarist in the school-renowned all-student rock-and-roll band the Redtones. He migrated to Hawaii in 1967 after graduating from Mapua Institute of Technology, with a BSME degree. He was drafted in the US Army in 1968 during the Vietnam War, topped the battalion classification and IQ exam, and was assigned to the Air Defense School, specializing in Fire Distribution System Electronics in Fort Bliss, Texas. Nighttime was spent in taking postgraduate studies in computer science at New Mexico State University on-post facility. He returned to Hawaii in 1970 with an honorable discharge and certificate of appreciation from the president and the Department of the Army Chief of Staff. He joined Ferris and Hamig, consulting mechanical engineers, and was immediately immersed and participated in the state’s construction boom of the seventies. In 1973, he was the Philippines’s first educated Filipino immigrant to become a registered professional engineer in the State of Hawaii. He served as president of the Oahu Filipino Jaycees in 1977 and helped promote the advancement of young Filipino professional immigrants in Hawaii. His early work in sustainable energy was the design of the first commercial solar water-heating system for the Nuuanu YMCA in Honolulu in 1974. His mentor was University of Hawaii engineering professor James Chou, PhD, who developed solar thermal panels with the graduate students. He then designed a total energy system (power and water generation) project in 1975 for the Continental Hotel in Saipan, Micronesia, featuring a cogeneration waste-heat recovery from the engine generator for kitchen and laundry hot-water supply and guest rooms’ domestic water heating. Engine exhaust was also recovered to power an absorption chiller to augment the chilled water supply for the hotel air-conditioning (A/C) system. Other cogen projects are the Sheraton Hotel in Fiji in 1977 and the Taj Mahal Hotel in Columbo, Sri Lanka, in 1978. He was also the mechanical designer of the Chang Kai Sheik International Airport, Taiwan, ROC, in 1976. He designed the first water-to-water heat-pump application in Hawaii at the Arcadia Retirement Home, recovering waste heat from the cooling tower for domestic water heating in 1979, with a payback period of one year. He also designed the largest domestic solar water-heating system at the Quad K, Schofield Barracks, US Army in Oahu in 1979, which received the ASHRAE, Hawaii Chapter, Energy Engineering Excellence award in 1984. In 1983, he conducted a natural ventilation design study with R. G. Wood and Associates, Architects for the Pacific Division, Naval Facilities Engineering Command on the proposed Unaccompanied Enlisted Personnel Housing (UEPH) P-082 project , Submarine Base, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The positive result of the study with a $5 million savings with the possible elimination of the air-conditioning system has made the project continue to the design phase. Construction started in 1984 and was finished in 1986. It received the Hawaii Governor’s award—National Awards Program for Energy Innovation—and the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Special Award for Energy Innovation in 1987. This is this project that made him decide to write a book about natural ventilation. However, due to his hectic schedule, it got allocated at the back burner of his priorities and always got postponed. His first geothermal design application to a resort hotel project was conceived in 1986, with construction documents finished in 1988 and the Grand Hyatt Kauai hotel opening in 1990. Brackish water from a deep beachside well for the hotel water features was tapped and utilized as a thermal source to cool the electric air-conditioning chillers in lieu of cooling towers, which saved eighty-five thousand gallons of freshwater per day. High-lift heat pumps were also utilized to provide the nighttime air-conditioning requirements and simultaneously to generate hot water for the guest rooms’ usage. It received the Consulting Engineers Council of Hawaii’s (CECH’s) Excellence Award and was a American Consulting Engineers Council (ACEC) national finalist in Washington, DC, in 1992. Other notable resort hotel designs are as follows: Hyatt Regency, Waikiki (1972), Manele Bay Hotel and Koele Lodge in Lanai (1989), and Ritz Carlton Resort Hotel, Kapalua, Maui (1990). He was also involved with challenging military projects, such as the Star Wars project and Strategic Air Command (SAC) B-52 Bomber Avionic Facilities (both in Diego Garcia) and the MK-48 Torpedo Facility at Submarine Base, Pearl Harbor. Another very interesting project was the design of the Underwater World in Tumon Bay, Guam, in 1999, a million gallons of world-class aquarium with a 240-foot-long seamless acrylic tunnel traversing underwater. Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) offered off-peak discounted power rate to encourage thermal energy storage (TES) air-conditioning design in 1990 with no takers. Don finally designed the first TES project in Hawaii at the Maryknoll High School campus in 1997. It received the CECH Engineering Excellence award in 1999. He was awarded Engineer of the Year by the Hawaii Society of Professional Engineers in 2000. He also designed the first underground TES district cooling at Maryknoll Garde School campus and received another ACEC–Hawaii Engineering Excellence Honor Award in 2003. He received the Republic of the Philippines Presidential Award for Outstanding Filipino Individual Overseas in 2006. Working as consultant to Mitsunaga and Associates, Hawaii, he was involved in the implementation of the LEED Silver design requirements on several buildings and facilities on the $19 billion US Military Base Youngsan Relocation Project (YRP) in South Korea since 2009. He designed the University of St. La Salle (USLS), Bacolod City, Philippines TES Air-Conditioning Retrofit project in 2010. He is presently doing construction management for this project. He is married to Lilia Villaluz Sabinay and they have two children, Donna and Jan Leif. Extracurricular activities are primarily golf and basketball. He was a member of the Filipino-American Military Basketball League, Super Senior Division, crowned champion in 1995. Hobbies are painting in watercolor, acrylic, and oil media and playing the ukulele and guitar. He is presently a member of the Young Once, an all-engineer band playing “the oldies but the goodies” love songs of the 1960 to 1980 eras.