Overheating Risk of UK Dwellings Under a Changing Climate

Abstract

Building practitioners assess the overheating risk of buildings via dynamic thermal comfort simulation with hotter than average reference weather years. In the UK, the near-extreme hot summer years called Design Summer Years (DSY) offered by the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) are provided for fourteen locations for the purpose of estimating overheating risk of naturally ventilated buildings. The current DSY is selected based on the third warmest mean summer dry bulb temperature (DryT) during April to September. However, it has been proved that the simple method used for creating DSY leads to obvious problems into the thermal comfort simulations. In this research, a new design summer year termed as a Hot Summer Year (HSY) is created based on weather data generated from the UK Climate Projections weather generator and the Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET). The effects of using the DSY and the HSY on indoor thermal comfort are analyzed based on a static overheating risk criterion recommended by CIBSE. With the aim of predicting future overheating risk, future HSYs are created for 2050s and 2080s under the high emission scenario for fourteen locations. These are created to investigate overheating risk of dwellings across the UK.