Thermal Retrofitting of Primary School Buildings in Egypt Optimizing Energy Efficiency and Thermal Comfort

Abstract

As buildings are responsible for almost 30% of the total energy consumption worldwide, it makes it a necessary thing to study them and provide solutions to optimize their energy consumption, provide more thermal comfort for their users and mitigate their negative environmental impacts. Governmental school buildings in Egypt follow the same prototypes since the 1992 earthquake, these buildings represent a broad sector of buildings. These building prototypes are implemented in all Egypt governorates regardless of their climatic conditions and location which results in the lack of achieving the required thermal comfort for the students. This research paper aims at determining the most effective optimization strategies for school buildings in Egypt to enhance the occupants’ thermal comfort. The chosen school building prototype is the `most widely used in Cairo, Egypt as it represents around 34% of the seven prototypes of the constructed school buildings according to the General Authority for Educational Buildings (GAEB). By applying these retrofit strategies to the chosen prototype, the thermal retrofitting of existing school buildings in Egypt will create thermally optimized indoor environments for classrooms which will contribute to improving the educational environment in Egypt. Moreover, it will provide enhanced thermal comfort conditions to its users which will reflect on their academic development. The main contribution of this research is that the simulation studies highlighted the importance of integrating low-cost retrofitting strategies to balance the indoor temperature and increase the students’ thermal comfort. By applying simple low-cost retrofitting strategies such as roof shading and window shading, the discomfort hours in classrooms were reduced by 20%.