A case study on global-conscious and local-oriented housing design in a hot and humid climate. Part 2: evaluation of the thermal environment in indoor and semi-outdoor spaces.

In order to confirm the effectiveness of the indoor climate control system adopted in the experimental house, the indoor climate in summer was evaluated for the experimental house and two other buildings in Nanning city and a comparison was made. Two vernacular buildings which have natural indoor and semi-outdoor cooling systems were selected for the study The majority of the measurements were taken using the spherical thermography system. The results showed that the quality of the indoor thermal environment of each building is approximately the same.

Use of computer simulation in the design of a naturally ventilated library.

Sustainable building design has received increased attention over recent years and the use of natural ventilation in non-domestic buildings has been integral to this forward-looking issue. Natural ventilation design has been assisted by the availability of computer-based simulation techniques capable of predicting aspects of building design such as thermal comfort and air quality.

Design of the built environment: its impact on energy demand and consumption in Saudi Arabia.

Although Saudi Arabia empowers the world with energy, the country is faced with unprecedented demand on electric energy. The issue, however, is neither affordability nor shortage but the exponential growth of demand on electricity, which reached an annual rate of 17% [Ministry of Industry and Electricity (MIE), 1995). This figure indicates that we need to double the number of our power generation plants within few years in order to meet the kingdom's present and near future demand.

Comparison of Windows and DOS versions of the DOE2 in simulating a passive building.

Visual DOE is a Windows interface version of the DOE2 simulation program. Its purpose is to help save time in writing BDL input for the simulation. As its calculation engine is the same as DOE2 in the DOS version, DOE should result in the same output as the DOS version. However, difficulties arise in identifying the building's configurations, materials and construction and systems in the two input versions. While modeling a simple one-story Hpassive H building, it was difficult to get a good match in the simulation results in the two versions.

Comfortability in urban houses of the tropics.

For a house to be habitable it needs to be comfortable. In the warm humid climates interiors need to be cool for most of the year in order to be comfortable vis a vis habitable. There are many factors that contribute to the comfortable part of the overall habitability of a house particularly its aspects of design. The paper analyses the thermal conditions in ten different houses in Dhaka, Bangladeshi in representative days of the three main seasons and tries to identify design aspects that make some houses more comfortable hence habitable than others

Use of a wind wing-wall as a device for low-energy passive comfort cooling in a high-rise tower in the warm-humid tropics.

This paper discusses the use of the 'wind wing wall' as a device for the passive low-energy 'comfort cooling' of the occupants in the interior of a tall building. The case study building is a 21-storey, high-rise office tower. the UMNO building designed by Hamzah and Yeang located in Penang, Malaysia which has been designed to be airconditioned, but can also be naturally ventilated if conditions are suitable. The paper describes cfd air flow modelling of the wind effects on the building and the effect on internal temperatures, air movement and ventilation.

Large office buildings, what are the dominant parameters for energy consumption?

The thermal behaviour of an office building is presented and discussed, as well as the results of a sensitivity study, which analyses the impact of architectural decisions and the effect of occupancy in terms of energy consumption (cooling and heating loads). This study was carried out using one floor of an office building, with large glazed facades, recently built in S. Paulo in Brazil, which was monitored for a short period (11 days)]. This building has been used as reference, for the sensitivity studies carried out for two climates, S. Paulo in Brazil and Lisbon in Portugal.

Natural cooling in Hispano-Moslem religious architecture: the case study of the Mosque of Cordoba.

The Mosque of Cordoba is the best example of the Islamic religious buildings that survived in Spain. Its typology corresponds to a mosque of a large scale with the common plan of the early Muslim art. This model became an architectural reference for the mosques of Western Islam. The paper presents the results of measurements undertaken to assess the environmental performance of this building.

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