Approach to choose proper passive design strategies for residential buildings

Abstract

The climates differ greatly in China, ranging from severe cold to hot. This significantly influences building design strategies used to achieve indoor thermal comfort. To choose proper passive strategies for different climate zones in the early design stage, bioclimatic chart method has been used during the past decades. However, limited efforts have been conducted to test this method. This paper focuses on developing an approach to choose suitable passive strategies by combining building simulation tools and thermal comfort theories together. To achieve this purpose, hourly simulation program was used to obtain indoor thermal environment based on building description and outdoor weather condition. Adaptive thermal comfort model was used to determine whether indoor thermal environment was comfortable. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.