Residential Buildings In Singapore Research Articles

Impact of architectural design strategies on the indoor natural ventilation of public residential buildings in Singapore

The architectural design pattern of the public residential buildings developed by Housing and Development Board (HDB) of Singapore has evolved gradually throughout the past decades. However, the fact is that although the new generations of HDB blocks built in recent years are designed to be modernized, the usage of air-conditioning has been increasing in comparison with the old generations. This study aims to investigate the ventilation performance of HDB blocks built in different generations from a historical view. By conducting computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations on five typical blocks built in different generations, the area-weighted wind velocities in various rooms of the target units were obtained. The effects of design factors on wind velocity ratio (VR) in corresponding spaces were analyzed and compared. The results show that the old generations with parallel plan layouts generally facilitate cross-ventilation while the new generations with centralized plan layouts usually generate single-sided ventilation which is more sensitive to incoming wind direction. Meanwhile, the window-to-wall ratio and shading depth of the studied facades were validated to have positive and negative relations to the VRs respectively. Though the correlations are insignificant, they show significant disparities between the scenarios under different incoming winds.

Indoor Thermal Environment in Different Generations of Naturally Ventilated Public Residential Buildings in Singapore

This study aims to evaluate and compare the indoor air velocities and thermal environment inside different generations of public residential buildings developed by the Housing and Development Board (HDB) of Singapore and analyze the impact of façade design on the indoor thermal environment. To achieve this goal, several case studies were carried out, namely, five typical HDB blocks built in different generations from the 1970s to recent years. Firstly, these five blocks with different façade design features were simulated to obtain the indoor air temperatures for both window-closed and window-open scenarios by using the EnergyPlus V22.2.0 (U.S. Department of Energy) and Design-Builder v6 software(DesignBuilder Software Ltd, Stroud, Gloucs, UK). Meanwhile, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were conducted to obtain the area-weighted wind velocities in the corresponding zones to evaluate the indoor thermal comfort. Accordingly, the effects of façade design on indoor air temperatures under both the window-closed and window-open conditions were compared and analyzed. Positive correlations between the facades’ window-to-wall ratio (WWR) and the residential envelope transmittance value (RETV) and Ta were confirmed with statistical significance at a 0.05 level. Furthermore, the indoor thermal comfort based on the wind open scenarios was also investigated. The results indicate that the thermal environment can be greatly improved by implementing proper façade design strategies as well as opening the windows, which could result in an average 3.2 °C reduction in Ta. Finally, some principles were proposed for the façade design of residential buildings in tropical regions with similar climate conditions.

Data-driven prediction and optimization of residential building performance in Singapore considering the impact of climate change

Research on the performance of tropical residential buildings requires careful consideration of the effects of the changing weather conditions. Based on machine learning and multi-objective genetic optimization algorithms, this study proposes an integrated framework for predicting and optimizing the performance of residential buildings in Singapore. The framework was used for two Singapore residential building types, the point block building and the slab block building, to examine their optimal performance in terms of daylight performance, energy efficiency, and thermal comfort under future climate conditions in the short term (2021–2040), middle term (2041–2060), and long term (2061–2100). The results show that the XGBoost algorithm and transfer learning method perform well in building performance prediction, specifically in the source domain (point block buildings) with R2 = 0.95 and in the target domain (slab block building) with R2 = 0.87. The general trend in the optimal design parameters for residential buildings is to enhance the thermal insulation of building walls and envelopes to better cope with future warming climate conditions, while providing adequate indoor lighting. This study contributes to the field of climate-resilient residential buildings in Singapore. This is closely linked to the Singapore government's quest for sustainable development and to enhance the well-being of its residents.

Modern architectural tourism in Singapore

PurposeExisting tourism studies focusing on Southeast Asia often emphasize the culture, history and heritage of the region or its natural beauty and cuisine, most of which are often viewed as exotic through a Western lens. By contrast, this interdisciplinary study looks at the untapped potential for modern architectural tourism in Singapore as a fascinating and increasingly authentic way of understanding how the next generation of Singaporean residents will live in their land-scarce city-state. This study aims to highlight the importance of modern architecture as a tourism product in a globalized Asian city.Design/methodology/approachIt engages with visiting architects and their local facilitator to examine the touristic potential energy of cutting-edge residential buildings in Singapore from an intra-Asian viewpoint. By also identifying practical design solutions to promote modern architectural tourism that will have a positive impact on city branding, this study opens the door for future research regarding Southeast Asia’s rapidly changing modern architecture and urban landscape, and how these can be made attractive for its important tourism industry.FindingsThe findings suggest that just as Singapore’s cultural diversity has long been viewed as a touristic asset, its authentic, escapist, exotic and spectacular contemporary residential architecture, if well managed, presented and designed, can provide a unique place for sustainable community interactions between locals and visitors, which will help Singapore develop a unique city brand attractive to architectural tourists and even repeat visitors, through a new concept for authenticity in a global city.Originality/valueThis cross-disciplinary study linking tourism and architecture explores modern architectural tourism in Singapore, specifically in relation to residential buildings where locals and visitors can interact.

Façade inspection for falling objects from tall buildings in Singapore

PurposeThis paper highlights a crucial public safety issue due to falling objects from tall residential buildings in Singapore. A systematic façade inspection regime and a system of evaluation of severity for the detection and assessment of potential falling objects from tall buildings are presented.Design/methodology/approachThe research uses qualitative case study approach with 450 tall residential buildings sampled for the study. The common materials, elements, components with high risk of falling objects, the nature and type of the falling, the critical factors affecting the falling, the respective level of severity, and the effectiveness of various diagnostic techniques and protocols, are summarised.FindingsFaçade for tall residential buildings in Singapore comprises mainly cementitious materials cast in situ or precast, with fixtures and architectural features, all of which have potential of falling. The common anomalies arising from each material and fixture/features are identified, the causes evaluated and their implications to future design, construction and maintenance analysed.Originality/valueThis study provides original and significant information to a crucial public safety issue, setting design and construction criteria that will serve as a benchmark for new and existing facades, applicable to all cities dominated by tall buildings. The paper presents original figures, checklists and guides as a basis for readers' consideration to use according to their respective unique conditions.

Are Green Buildings Really 'Greener'? Energy Efficiency of Green Mark Certified Buildings in Singapore

There is no conclusive evidence in the existing literature to show that green buildings save more energy than conventional buildings. Why do buyers pay premiums for green buildings? This study empirically examines whether the “Green Mark” (GM) certification is either a signal for energy efficiency in buildings or a reputational signal segregating developers in the pooling equilibrium. Using a unique panel of electricity consumption data for a large sample of residential buildings in Singapore, we do not find significant differences in energy consumptions between GM-certified buildings and non-GM-certified buildings, on the days when the sky is shrouded by strong haze and the energy consumption in the buildings is relatively high. However, we find that the average transaction price of GM-certified dwellings is 1.61% higher than that of the comparable not GM-certified dwellings. With a difference-in-difference approach, we show significant and positive GM labeling announcement effects on housing prices and energy consumption. An instrumental variable approach is employed to deal with potential omitted variable bias and reverse causality issues between energy consumption and housing prices and to determine whether green housing is a sound investment that leads to intangible returns. The 2SLS estimates indicate that electricity consumption has no effect on housing prices implying that green housing premiums may not be as valuable without providing the expected energy savings.

Modeling and Validation of Electrical Load Profiling in Residential Buildings in Singapore

The demand of electricity keeps increasing in this modern society and the behavior of customers vary greatly from time to time, city to city, type to type, etc. Generally, buildings are classified into residential, commercial and industrial. This study is aimed to distinguish the types of residential buildings in Singapore and establish a mathematical model to represent and model the load profile of each type. Modeling household energy consumption is the first step in exploring the possible demand response and load reduction opportunities under the smart grid initiative. Residential electricity load profiling includes the details on the electrical appliances, its energy requirement, and consumption pattern. The model is generated with a bottom-up load model. Simulation is performed for daily load profiles of 1 or 2 rooms, 3 rooms, 4 rooms and 5 rooms public housing. The simulated load profile is successfully validated against the measured electricity consumption data, using a web-based Customer Energy Portal (CEP) at the campus housings of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Modeling a Decision Support Tool for Buildable and Sustainable Building Envelope Designs

Sustainability and buildability requirements in building envelope design have significantly gained more importance nowadays, yet there is a lack of an appropriate decision support system (DSS) that can help a building design team to incorporate these requirements and manage their tradeoffs at once. The main objective of this study is to build such a tool to facilitate a building design team to take into account sustainability and buildability criteria for assessment of building envelopes of high-rise residential buildings in Singapore. Literature reviews were conducted to investigate a comprehensive set of the sustainability and buildability criteria. This also included development of the tool using a Quality Functional Deployment (QFD) approach combined with fuzzy set theory. A building design team was engaged to test the tool with the aim to evaluate usefulness of the tool in managing the tradeoffs among the sustainability and buildability criteria. The results from a qualitative data analysis suggested that the tool allowed the design team to effectively find a balance between the tradeoffs among the criteria when assessing multiple building envelope design alternatives. Main contributions of using this tool are achievement of a more efficient assessment of the building envelopes and more sustainable and buildable building envelope design.

Empirical relationships between natural vibration period and height of buildings in Singapore

SUMMARYSingapore is a classic case of a modern metropolis with low hazard but high exposure to the seismicity in Sumatra. Because of land shortage, more than 80% of the population lives in high‐rise residential buildings. As part of the efforts to assess the seismic performance of buildings in Singapore subjected to long‐distance Sumatran earthquakes, relationships between the natural vibration period and height of high‐rise public residential buildings in Singapore are derived empirically by conducting ambient vibration tests on 116 buildings. The measured buildings have a height ranging from 4 to 30 stories. The aspect ratio of buildings in plan is found to be insignificant in affecting the natural vibration period of the first mode of the buildings. The period‐height relationships are derived using regression analysis considering the site properties of a building. It is concluded that the vibration periods estimated from the proposed period‐height relationship for buildings located at soft‐soil site are about 40% longer than the vibration periods estimated for buildings located at firm‐soil site. Measurements are also conducted to study the influence of buildings on the measured frequency of the surrounding soil. For this purpose, two buildings with 25 and 30 stories located at firm‐soil site and soft‐soil site, respectively, are selected. It is found that the distance of building influence on the measured frequency of the surrounding soil may reach up to one building height for a firm‐soil site and two building heights for a soft‐soil site. Additional data of natural vibration periods of 19 instrumented residential buildings, which have height ranging from 9 to 30 stories, were obtained from the building response recorded during the September 30, 2009 Sumatran earthquake event. The natural vibration periods of these buildings are compared with those estimated using the proposed period‐height relationships, and the absolute differences are found to be less than 12%. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mitigation Methods of Climate Change Impact on the Cooling Load of Public Residential Buildings in Singapore

Buildings have time-varying interactions with the local climate condition for the heating or cooling systems; changes of the surrounding climate condition affect building energy consumption. Based on the thermal envelope approach, which considers the heat gain by conduction and radiation through the wall and fenestration, the cooling load simulation study was conducted to see the impact of climate change on the cooling load of public residential buildings in Singapore and propose mitigation methods to bring the predicted increase of the cooling load in the future back to the current level. From the simulation results, climate change is predicted to increase the cooling load of current public residential models for 11.8–55.8% through three different time frames. Based on the parametric study of mitigation methods proposed, changing the material of the wall, material of the glass, and the surface properties show a smaller increase in the predicted cooling load compared with other methods because of the low window to wall ratio. A combination of three methods shows that the increase of the predicted cooling load in Period 3 can be brought back to the current level.

Criteria for Architects and Engineers to Achieve Sustainability and Buildability in Building Envelope Designs

AbstractSustainability and buildability in building envelope design have gained more importance in recent years, yet there is a lack of an appropriate set of criteria for applicability assessment of building envelope materials and designs for high-rise residential buildings in Singapore. The main objectives of this study are to identify the criteria for achieving sustainability and buildability and to investigate perspectives of architects and engineers on these criteria on the basis of the institutional theory framework. Questionnaire survey of architects, civil and structural (C&S) engineers, and mechanical and electrical (M&E) engineers in Singapore were conducted to examine their perspectives on importance weights of the criteria. Severity index (SI) analysis was applied to determine SI values of the criteria for ranking purposes. The results from Spearmen rank correlation show that the rankings of the criteria by the architects, C&S engineers, and M&E engineers were statistically correlated. The find...

Energy performance of residential buildings in Singapore

Energy consumption of buildings takes up about a third of Singapore's total electricity production. In this paper, we present a pioneering study to investigate the energy performance of residential buildings. Beginning with an energy survey of households, we established the air-conditioning usage patterns and modelled residential buildings for computer simulations. An ETTV equation for residential buildings was developed. Employing this equation, we demonstrated how to achieve improved energy efficiency in residential buildings. Two types of residential buildings, namely, point block and slab block, were modelled and parametric runs performed. ETTV impacts the energy consumption of residential buildings and thus lowering the ETTV will result in reduced building heat load. Results from the developed equation showed that a unit decrease in ETTV resulted in 4% and 3.5% reduction in annual cooling energy for point block and slab block residential buildings, respectively. In addition, a set of simple energy and load estimating equations were developed using computer simulation and local climatic data. These equations provided a means of estimating the annual cooling energy consumption of residential buildings in Singapore.

Applying Natural Ventilation for Thermal Comfort in Residential Buildings in Singapore

This paper explores the potential of using natural ventilation for indoor thermal comfort in residential buildings in Singapore based on climatic data analyses. A typical year of weather data was selected by statistical analyses of weather data over a five-year period in Singapore. The characteristics of weather data for a typical year were analyzed with regard to temperatures, wind speeds, and wind directions. Thermal comfort models for natural ventilation applicable for Singapore were used for the assessment of thermal conditions. It was found that by applying natural ventilation, a thermally comfortable indoor environment can potentially be provided for a large number of hours in the year with optimum of facade designs for residential buildings (negligible heat sources). The study also developed facade design guidelines based on the required indoor air velocities for thermal comfort.

Facade design optimization for naturally ventilated residential buildings in Singapore

Parametric studies of facade designs for naturally ventilated residential buildings in Singapore were carried out to optimize facade designs for better indoor thermal comfort and energy saving. Two criteria regarding indoor thermal comfort for naturally ventilated residential buildings are used in this study. To avoid the perception of thermal asymmetry, temperature difference between mean radiant temperature and indoor ambient air temperature should be less than 2 °C [F.A. Chrenko, Heated ceilings and comfort. J. Inst. Heat. Ventilating Eng. 20 (1953) 375–396; F.A. Chrenko, Heated ceilings and comfort. J. Inst. Heat. Ventilating Eng. 21 (1953) 145–154]. Thermal comfort regression model for naturally ventilated residential buildings in Singapore was used to evaluate various facade designs either. Facade design parameters: U-values, orientations, WWR (window to wall ratio) and shading device lengths are considered in the investigation. The building simulation results for a typical residential building in Singapore indicated that the U-value of facade materials for north and south orientations should be less than 2.5 W/m 2 K and the U-value of facade materials for north and south orientations should be less than 2 W/m 2 K. From the coupled simulation results, it was found that the optimum window to wall ratio is equal to 0.24. Optimum facade designs and thermal comfort indexes are summarized for naturally ventilated residential buildings in Singapore.

The impacts of ventilation strategies and facade on indoor thermal environment for naturally ventilated residential buildings in Singapore

The impacts of various ventilation strategies and facade designs on indoor thermal environment for naturally ventilated residential buildings in Singapore are investigated in this study based on thermal comfort index. Four ventilation strategies, nighttime-only ventilation, daytime-only ventilation, full-day ventilation and no ventilation were evaluated for hot-humid climate according to the number of thermal discomfort hours in the whole typical year on the basis of a series of TAS simulations. Parametric studies of facade designs on orientations, window to wall ratios and shading devices were performed for two typical weeks by coupled simulations between building simulation ESP-r and CFD (FLUENT). The results indicate that full-day ventilation for indoor thermal comfort is better than the other three ventilation strategies. With various facade design studies, it was found that north- and south-facing facades can provide much comfortable indoor environment than east- and west-facing facades in Singapore. It is recommended that optimum window to wall ratio 0.24 can improve indoor thermal comfort for full-day ventilation and 600 mm horizontal shading devices are needed for each orientation in order to improve thermal comfort in further.

A study of the effectiveness of passive climate control in naturally ventilated residential buildings in Singapore

Singapore has the hot and humid climate throughout the year. Many passive climate control methods are adopted in the naturally ventilated residential buildings to help achieve thermal comfort and reduce the energy consumption of air-conditioning. A field measurement and computational energy simulations were conducted to examine the effectiveness of commonly used passive climate control methods for these buildings. The effect of building orientation, façade construction, special roof system and window shading device on indoor thermal environment and cooling load was studied. The surface temperature of external wall and indoor thermal environment was measured to analyze the façade thermal performance. The cooling load was simulated to evaluate the effectiveness of various passive climate methods. Using the special roof system as thermal buffer is the most efficient method to reduce the room cooling load.

04/02547 Comparative study of the indoor air quality ofnaturally ventilated and air-conditioned bedrooms of residential buildings in Singapore: Wong, N.H. Y. H. and Huang, B. Building and Environment, 2004, 39, (9), 1115–1123

04/02547 Comparative study of the indoor air quality ofnaturally ventilated and air-conditioned bedrooms of residential buildings in Singapore: Wong, N.H. Y. H. and Huang, B. Building and Environment, 2004, 39, (9), 1115–1123

Comparative study of the indoor air quality of naturally ventilated and air-conditioned bedrooms of residential buildings in Singapore

Indoor air quality (IAQ) measurements were carried out in 3 residential dwellings in Singapore to find out the indoor air quality (IAQ) of the bedrooms. It was found that when the subjects utilized air-conditioners while sleeping, there was a considerable build-up of carbon dioxide ( CO 2) (>1000 ppm) for all types of air-conditioners. These CO 2 levels were substantial higher as compared to naturally ventilated bedrooms. A survey was also conducted to investigate whether occupants exhibited sick building syndrome (SBS) symptoms while sleeping in air-conditioned (AC) as well as naturally ventilated (NV) bedrooms. A comparison showed that almost all occupants who used air-conditioners while sleeping exhibited one or more SBS symptoms and these occupants usually displayed more SBS symptoms after using air-conditioning than when they utilized natural ventilation. The survey also revealed that the frequency and duration of usage of air conditioning has important impact on the exhibition of the SBS symptoms.

Design of tall residential buildings in Singapore for wind effects

The design of high-rise building is often influenced by wind-induced motions such as accelerations and lateral deflections. Consequently, the building's structural stiffness and dynamic (vibration periods and damping) properties become important parameters in the determination of such motions. The approximate methods and empirical expressions used to quantify these parameters at the design phase tend to yield values significantly different from each other. In view of this, there is a need to examine how actual buildings in the field respond to dynamic wind loading in order to ascertain a more realistic model for the dynamic behavior of buildings. This paper describes the findings from full-scale measurements of the wind-induced response of typical high-rise buildings in Singapore, and recommends an empirical forecast model for periods of vibration of typical buildings in Singapore, an appropriate computer model for determining the periods of vibration, and appropriate expressions which relate the wind speed to accelerations in buildings based on wind tunnel force balance model test and field results.