Energy target pinch analysis for optimising thermal comfort in low-income dwellings

Abstract

Technology acceptance plays a critical role in adopting thermal comfort strategies. Not only economic but socio-cultural context becomes pivotal when preference is considered. Yet, the fuzziness of what is acceptable remains under-researched in thermal comfort studies. This work intends to determine an optimal set of strategies for providing thermal comfort in low-income dwellings through a socio-technical methodology. A novel energy target pinch analysis (ETPA) method is developed for identifying optimal solution using a weighted Aggregate Acceptability Index. Data on thermal comfort and their willingness to acceptance was collected from 1267 low-income households in Mumbai, India. The study suggests that there exists a considerable gap in the acceptance of effective thermal comfort strategies by occupants of low-income housing and the interventions at community and policy level could be helpful in bridging this gap. The pinch analysis identified four sets of strategies in order of priority ranking involving adaptive actions and retrofit techniques for achieving thermal comfort under the acceptability constraints. The contribution of this study to thermal comfort literature is through a new ETPA optimisation method, for including the human choices function into the building energy efficiency and thermal comfort thereby providing pragmatic solutions for implementation.