New metrics for thermal resilience of passive buildings during heat events

Abstract

In the last years, the concept of thermal resilience has been gaining increasing relevance in building design. Several frameworks for resilience analysis were recently developed, which need to be tested and discussed through real case studies. However, few cases exist in the literature of passive and free-running buildings where thermal resilience against heat waves is analyzed from measured data. This paper aims to better understand and propose improvements to currently used overheating metrics. An in-depth analysis is performed of the thermal resilience against heat waves of a bioclimatic office building with passive strategies for indoor comfort in an arid region of central Argentina. Indoor conditions are obtained from both thermal simulations for two scenarios (with/without air conditioning) and in-situ monitoring. The results show that the selected metrics –also used by IEA-EBC Annex 80 - cannot fully describe the daily behavior of the building. Therefore, two new additional metrics are proposed, which account for solar radiation and the previous thermal history of the building. Their inclusion is a valuable contribution for passive and non-conditioned buildings towards a deeper understanding and improvement of thermal resilience against heat waves.