Sensitivity analysis in building performance simulation for summer comfort assessment of apartments from the real estate market

Abstract

Overheating appears as a recurrent problem in apartments of the real estate market of Santiago de Chile, since their architectural design frequently does not incorporate passive cooling techniques. This situation is encouraged by a Thermal Regulation that allows extensive glazing surfaces in the apartments and that does not propose any criteria for limiting the risk of overheating. Nine apartment typologies were defined using the k-means clustering method from a database that contains 21,902 units. Sensitivity analysis was carried out by means of both global and local approaches, in order to identify the most sensitive parameters with respect to the summer comfort and the net effect of each single parameter, respectively. The results obtained suggest that the best performance in terms of summer comfort can be obtained from the combination of diverse parameters that would be significant in respect to the reduction of overheating, such as solar protection and night ventilation. In this sense, the approach proposed for this study not only allows introducing improvements in terms of summer thermal conditions according to the specific requirements of the apartment typologies, but also suggests the integration of attributes with the aim of being developed at the level of their value chain.