Abstract
In Malaysia, terraced housing hardly provides thermal comfort to the occupants. More often than not, mechanical cooling, which is an energy consuming component, contributes to outdoor heat dissipation that leads to an urban heat island effect. Alternatively, encouraging natural ventilation can eliminate heat from the indoor environment. Unfortunately, with static outdoor air conditioning and lack of windows in terraced houses, the conventional ventilation technique does not work well, even for houses with an air well. Hence, this research investigated ways to maximize natural ventilation in terraced housing by exploring the air well configurations. By adopting an existing single storey terraced house with an air well, located in Kuching, Sarawak, the existing indoor environmental conditions and thermal performance were investigated and monitored using scientific equipment, namely HOBO U12 air temperature and air humidity, the HOBO U12 anemometer and the Delta Ohm HD32.3 Wet Bulb Globe Temperature meter. For this parametric study, the DesignBuilder software was utilized. The field study illustrated that there is a need to improve indoor thermal comfort. Thus, the study further proposes improvement strategies to the existing case study house. The proposition was to turn the existing air well into a solar chimney taking into account advantages of constant and available solar radiation for stack ventilation. The results suggest that the enhanced air well was able to improve the indoor room air velocity and reduce air temperature. The enhanced air well with 3.5 m height, 1.0 m air gap width, 2.0 m length was able to induce higher air velocity. During the highest air temperature hour, the indoor air velocity in existing test room increased from 0.02 m/s in the existing condition to 0.29 m/s in the hottest day with 2.06 °C air temperature reduction. The findings revealed that the proposed air well could enhance the thermal and ventilation performance under the Malaysia tropical climate.
Highlights
Energy consumption has been a critical and sensitive global issue for a few decades
The results show that under highest air temperatures of 35 ◦C the indoor thermal performance with modified air well could enhance the indoor temperature for 4 ◦C compared to the existing condition [17]
The impact of effective solar chimney/air well as well as louvres is important to this study
Summary
Energy consumption has been a critical and sensitive global issue for a few decades now. The building industry has been considered to be a high energy consumption industry where a huge amount of fuel and energy is consumed throughout the building life span. In order to reduce the energy consumption along the building operational period especially for the tropic countries, passive cooling design plays an important role. Most buildings are designed with an air-conditioning system in mind, the passive cooling design solution has been eliminated preventing cold air leakage which would lead to high costs of energy consumption. Most users and occupants do not realize that thermal comfort generated by an effective passive cooling system is closely related to the energy consumption cost. With an effective passive cooling system, the monthly electricity bill can be cut down
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