Standard review and update for tropical comfort shift of the built environment

Abstract

The urban building standards recommend adaptable shift on heat and noise criteria as the main issues related to the high-density environment. The previous studies relating to building thermal comfort provided the comparison results between the past and recent conditions. This study reviews the guidelines and regulations of international standard, overseas countries, and specific region of tropical climate research in Indonesia. The evaluation is focused on tropical climate in order to reach the accurate thermal comfort and noise criteria comparison for Indonesia. Furthermore, the field study of the 71 of the tropical built environment respondents was also conducted in order to update and compare to the existing standards. The review results show that compared to 17°C to 31°C thermal comfort range from the World Health Organization, the tropical thermal comfort should be determined with a range of 29.3°C to 31°C. Based on the field studies, for lowland is formulated by 1.4x+29.3 and in highland is 1.5x+29.3 as two representative regions of the tropical environment. For noise criteria, some countries set the policy for determining noise limits which has the same value between day and night condition as the result of the constant number of noise source with the similar level of annoyance. Based on the field study, this study updates the noise criteria which the denser environment, lowland, has limits of noise in 49.9 dBA when in highland is 47.8 dBA. Both of them are lower than 55 dBA of Indonesian Standard. Noise perception by occupants in nighttime shows that both in the lowland and in the highland, the vote is lower than daytime. The noise limits are 45.9 dBA and 40.0 dBA for lowland and highland, respectively. In general, the updated standard completes the existing and the detail of Indonesia national standard and the will be useful to guide the tropical building design.