Towards a Green Building: A Preliminary Study of Natural Ventilation on Thermal Comfort and its Impact on Residential Building in the City of New Borg El Arab

Abstract

Natural ventilation considered a one of challenges of the green building design. This paper introduces a preliminary study for measuring the extent of natural ventilation on thermal comfort to the impact of indoor air quality in the residential building in the city of New Borg El Arab (Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, E-JUST as example) in relation to air velocity, relative humidity, and air temperature. New Borg El Arab climate in the site location is semi-arid Mediterranean climate, this type of climate is characterized by a brief, mild, moderate rain in winter and long warm summer months with no rain. To apply this study, a methodological procedure has been followed. A field study is conducted in a one flat from the building of the E-JUST to assess the indoor thermal conditions based on adaptive standard comfort model during the month of climate change (October through 3 experimental measuring 1st, middle, and last of the month). The indoor measured data of air temperature, air velocity and relative humidity were used to check if the apartment that choose as a case study complies the thermal comfort or not by using ASHRAE psychrometric chart. Personal observations, field measurements and ASHRAE psychrometric chart analyses show that there is significant thermal discomfort inside the domain. The results indicated that the indoor air quality in many of the cases didn't achieve the thermal comfort for most time. This is because there is no circulation for natural ventilation in this orientation of the domain.