Tropics

Occupant exposure to airborne pathogens in buildings can be reduced by a variety of means, including adequate provision of outdoor air by ventilation. This is particularly important in buildings, such as hospitals, which may house a higher number of infected individuals relative to the wider population. In tropical Africa, however, there is evidence that new hospitals built with air-conditioning to cope with the extreme heat are poorly ventilated compared to existing hospitals that were designed to be naturally ventilated.

Conventional Displacement Ventilation (DV) system has been installed in an office of a Zero Energy Building (ZEB). Enhanced DV (EDV) system, consisting of fans mounted to the chair, which has been demonstrated in laboratory and field environmental chamber studies earlier was implemented for the first time in a full-scale office environment to assess its effectiveness of improving the thermal sensation of the occupants. Objective measurements and subjective assessments were conducted in the office with 12 occupants over a period of 2 weeks.

Though wider diversities of environmental attributes are intrinsic in water fringed urban parks, these parks are less represented in the previous studies. Thus the study aims to explore the impact of environmental attributes of settings on user perceived controls for enhancing daytime thermal acceptability of water fringed urban parks in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The study investigated seven diversified settings which demonstrate varying shading levels and environmental attributes with visual integration of water surfaces.

This study reports the findings from subjective responses of tropically-acclimatized people and theirrelationships with cutaneous indicators at three air temperatures, i.e. 20.0, 23.0, and 26.0C. A blindintervention study was conducted in a simulated office environment. Ninety-six subjects were recruitedand divided into 6 groups of 16 subjects. Each group was asked to perform simulated office tasks in theroom for a continuous four-hour session. The subjects also completed surveys on general thermalcomfort and sensations at various body locations.

This paper briefly outlines the development of a design tool for ascertaining thermal comfort in high rise buildings in the tropics. The design tool, based on wind tunnel studies and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations, was then applied to four cities in the tropics: Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jakarta and Hong Kong. Can thermal comfort be achieved using solely natural ventilation? The overall conclusion was that natural ventilation alone cannot generally provide thermal comfort in high rise buildings in the tropics.