No abstract

One of the crucial issues in early stages of designing process of a building is a lack of architects' knowledge about the energy consumption in different forms of building with different proportions, especially in central courtyard forms. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of the ratio of perimeter to the height of the courtyard (R1) and the ratio of width to length of the courtyard (R2) on energy consumption. In the first step of this research, different proportions of central courtyard with different R1 and R2 were simulated in DesignBuilder software. Then, multi linear regression was used to find out the effect of different proportions (R1 and R2) on energy consumption through SPSS software. Finally, the effect of R1 and R 2 ratio on energy consumption was validated through investigating six existing central courtyard forms. The result demonstrated that the effective coefficient of the R1 and R2 ratio on energy consumption were -25.41 and 62.69 respectively. Findings of this research help architects to achieve relative acknowledge about the energy consumption of different proportions of the courtyard forms for creating more energy efficient forms.

New designing techniques have been used recently in design phases of buildings to adapt human thermal comfort. Due to wide range of energy consumption within a building, it is impossible to make a proper decision about the impact of different energy efficiency strategies without simulation tools. Architects need to understand the accuracy and precision of simulation software to use them as valuable tools to predict energy consumption. This research aims to investigate the validity of DesignBuilder simulation software by using the actual traditional house in terms of heat gain. In this study, the comparative method was used to determine the differences in heat gain in a traditional courtyard house in Kerman that was simulated using DesignBuilder software and measured experimentally. This study also reveals that the difference between simulation results and empirical measurement is not more than 10%. It can be concluded that DesignBuilder has enough validity to calculate the amount of heat gain in the rooms adjacent to courtyards.