Indoor summer thermal comfort in a changing climate: the case of a nearly zero energy house in Wallonia (Belgium).
(2021) Conference on Construction, Energy, Environment and Sustainability (CEES 2021) — Location: Coimbra (12.October.2021)
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- Abstract
- Today, facing climate change represents a double challenge for the building sector. On one hand, the sector has to reduce its impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and on the other hand designers have to guarantee comfortable indoor climate conditions in a changing climate. In this context, Wallonia (southern part of Belgium) is engaged in a drastic reduction of its greenhouse gas emissions and aims to reach a Carbon Neutral building stock by 2050. This relies on the generalization of the nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEB) concept for all buildings, including existing ones. In temperate oceanic climate, it mainly implies a drastic reduction of buildings heating energy demand by high thermal insulation levels and airtightness of the building envelope. Many studies have however shown that indoor summer thermal comfort in nZEB requires specific attention even in current climate. It is also clear that global warming will have a worsening impact on overheating risks in buildings. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the evolution of overheating risk of a typical nZEB house in Wallonia, in the frame of the changing climate. A whole building energy simulation of the house has been carried out using TRNsys18 simulation engine. The model has first been calibrated based on previous measurements, using ASHRAE guideline 14 indicators, in order to realistically evaluate the indoor summer thermal conditions encountered in the house. Data for current and future climatic conditions have been directly derived from high-resolution climate model. These models, dynamically downscaled from Global Climate Models (GCM), consider local climate variations and anomalies and allow a detailed geographical resolution (horizontal grid spacing <4km). Today, they are available in Belgium within the CORDEX project for the different representative concentration pathways (RCP). On these bases, the paper discusses the potential evolution of overheating risks in the living room and in the main bedroom of the house. The evaluation of summer thermal comfort is conducted according to CIBSE TM52 and TM59 criteria for historical (1976-2005) and future (RCP2.6 and 8.5) climates. It shows that the passive strategies currently deployed in the house won’t be enough to guarantee summer thermal comfort in the future, especially in the bedroom. In this way, the study emphasizes that considering summer thermal comfort and its possible evolution should be a priority for the design of nZEB houses (and related policies) also in temperate oceanic climate.
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Citations
Dartevelle, O., Altomonte, S., Masy, G., Mlecnik, E., & Van Moeseke, G. (2021). Indoor summer thermal comfort in a changing climate: the case of a nearly zero energy house in Wallonia (Belgium). In Itecons (ed.), CEES 2021 - International Conference on Construction, Energy, Environment and Sustainability. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/166445