Development of bioclimatic chart for passive building design

Abstract

The selection of building passive thermal design strategies is based heavily on the local climatic conditions. Identifying the best strategy for a given location can be made using bioclimatic charts. Such charts depend on the atmospheric pressure and are commonly available at sea level. Moreover, manual usage of these charts is cumbersome and time-consuming. In this work, the development of a bioclimatic chart for Muscat, as a case study, is described using Givoni's zones in rigorous detail based on typical meteorological year (TMY) data. A generic calculation tool that generates the psychrometric chart for any altitude has been developed using MATLABTM, the procedure described herein, can be imitated on most scripting languages for any location using its atmospheric pressure and TMY data.