Evaluation of the Thermal Resilience of a Community Hub

Abstract

The frequency of power outages as a result of climate pressures are increasing and community centres are relied on as areas of refuge. Therefore, designing these buildings with passive survivability in mind is important, and challanging due to its high occupancy and fresh air requirements. This paper aims to evaluate the design measures of a community hub in the Canadian province of Ontario through the thermal resilience metric of passive survivability using building performance simulations. This study compares the performance of design strategies from building certification programs commonly followed to achieve high-performance envelope design. These include Passive House, Zero Carbon Building and Ontario Building Code (OBC) compliance criteria. The performance indicator is defined as the duration of time that the buildings remain habitable until the arrival of help or repair in the event of an extended power outage. Using whole-building energy modeling a power outage is simulated and the building is forced to rely on passive means of maintaining comfort, the PH and ZCB cases show far improved thermal autonomy (60% and 49% acceptable, respectively) when compared to the code baseline (18%). The high-performance envelopes of the PH and ZCB cases also result in greater passive survivability performance in both extreme summer and winter conditions.