Resilient cooling of buildings to protect against heat waves and power outages: Key concepts and definition

Abstract

The concept of climate resilience has gained extensive international attention during the last few years and is now seen as the future target for building cooling design. However, before being fully implemented in building design, the concept requires a clear and consistent definition and a commonly agreed framework of key concepts. The most critical issues that should be given special attention before developing a new definition for resilient cooling of buildings are (1) the disruptions or the associated climatic shocks to protect against, (2) the scale of the built domain, (3) the timeline of resilience, (4) the events of disruption, (5) the stages of resilience, (6) the indoor climate limits and critical comfort conditions, and (7) the influencing factors of resilient cooling of buildings. This paper focuses on a scoping review of the most of the existing resilience definitions and the various approaches, found in 90 documents, towards possible resilient buildings. In conclusion, the paper suggests a definition and a set of criteria -vulnerability, resistance, robustness, and recoverability-that can help to develop intrinsic performance-driven indicators and functions of passive and active cooling solutions in buildings against two disruptors of indoor thermal environmental quality-heat waves and power outages.

Simulation-based framework to evaluate resistivity of cooling strategies in buildings against overheating impact of climate change

“…During the last decade, the concept of resistivity of buildings and cooling strategies emerged in several studies [1]. The term resistivity appeared under different names including: Resistance, Resilience, Robustness, and other terms.…”

“…The term resistivity appeared under different names including: Resistance, Resilience, Robustness, and other terms. For example, Attia et al [1] defines cooling resistance as the building system's ability to maintain the initial design conditions during the disturbances such as heatwaves or power outages. This paper defines so-called "climate change overheating resistivity" as the ability of building cooling strategies to resist the increase of indoor overheating risk against the increase of outdoor thermal severity in a changing climate.…”

“…This definition targets the ability of cooling strategies in buildings to maintain an acceptable thermal environment against the gradual worsening of weather conditions due to climate change, whereas the definition in Ref. [1] targets the ability of cooling strategies to suppress the short-term overheating incidents. There is a universal need to understand the notion of climate change overheating resistivity as a key factor in characterizing the future thermal performance of cooling strategies in buildings.…”

Optimal control of high-rise building mechanical ventilation system for achieving low risk of COVID-19 transmission and ventilative cooling

“…VC refers to introducing fresh outdoor air to remove excessive indoor heat and reduce cooling energy consumption ( IEA-EBC, 2018 ). VC is an attractive technology to decrease the cooling energy consumption and improve building resilience ( Attia et al, 2021 ; C. Zhang et al, 2021 ), which mitigates the hazard caused by the extreme events, e.g., heat wave (W. Miller et al, 2021 ). However, for achieving mechanical VC, there are requirements on the energy efficiency of fans and the ventilation rate.…”

Comprehensive Study of the Microclimate Parameters in the Residential Building

“… analysis of thermal losses in buildings [3,4,9,14,18];  analysis of energy efficiency and flexibility of the air conditioning and heating [1,15];  creating and improving calculation methods, algorithms to achieve optimal and effective energy consumption during peak hours [7,8,13,17];  experimental research using modern materials and studying their impact on increasing energy efficiency of buildings [11,16];  developing heat indicators and energy efficiency class limits in buildings [2,5,10,12]. The research papers analyzed point to a lack of studies on the impact of the microclimate of residential buildings on their efficiency.…”