Thermal performance in single-zone occupied space ancient Myanmar multistage roof buildings

Abstract

Multistage roofs are dominant features in the ancient Myanmar buildings. They describe the cultural context, social status and are a response to the local climates. However, little is known about the thermal performance of multistage roof buildings. The authors believe that this is the first study to access the thermal performance of multistage roof buildings taking into account their typologies, ventilation modes and roof materials. The findings revealed that the three-stage roof buildings received a shorter duration of a year for thermal discomfort compared to the single gable roof buildings. However, there were insignificant improvements in annual mean air temperature by using three-stage roofs. On the other hand, the roof space of three-stage roof buildings received a very high indoor air temperature that caused abandon roof spaces apart from acting as a response to the local climate contexts. The study highlights that the beautiful use of Le-baw allows adding the gable vents easily for better ventilation performance. The results from this study substantiate the findings of another computational fluid dynamic simulation and support the conclusion with a discussion that the three-stage roof buildings have more potential to improve a better thermal performance if they have gable vents.