Passive strategies towards energy efficient social housing: A parametric case study and decision-making framework in the Mexican tropical climate

Abstract

In Mexico, ancestral construction technology implemented techniques and methods that nowadays could be considered notions of bioclimatic design. However, this is no longer the norm, and the industrialized housing construction system focuses on cost reduction; this mainly impacts the social housing market, in which thermal comfort is a necessity remedied by increasing electrical energy consumption due to higher cooling loads. This work analyzes the parametric implementation of different passive systems to improve operational thermal comfort in affordable housing in southeastern Mexico's warm tropical climate. Each case study is based on the region's commonly used one- and two-story housing typologies. These scenarios are modeled in EnergyPlus + jEPlus to evaluate the annual thermal performance of building envelopes in hot weather in a representative city of the tropical region: Mérida. Via parametric modelling, a database with performance indicators, such as thermal comfort, operating temperature, construction costs, and cooling energy savings, was generated. Subsequently, implementing a Multi-Objective Optimization algorithm allowed data processing to filter and obtain optimal scenarios helpful in decision-making, minimizing cost factors, and maximizing thermal comfort. The optimization process results suggest that it is possible to get annual energy savings of around 20 % in cooling loads and reduce the yearly time of thermal discomfort by up to 50 %, with an increase in construction costs of a maximum of 36 % over the base home value. The results demonstrate the potential usefulness of the methodology presented in this research to obtain constructive solutions to improve thermal comfort with an optimal cost-benefit ratio.