Proposta de método para avaliação do desempenho térmico de residências unifamiliares em clima quente e úmido

Nowadays, evaluation methods to measure thermal performance of buildings have been developed in order to improve thermal comfort in buildings and reduce the use of energy with active cooling and heating systems. However, in developed countries, the criteria used in rating systems to asses the thermal and energy performance of buildings have demonstrated some limitations when applied to naturally ventilated building in tropical climates. The present research has as its main objective to propose a method to evaluate the thermal performance of low-rise residential buildings in warm humid climates, through computational simulation. The method was developed in order to conceive a suitable rating system for the athermal performance assessment of such buildings using as criteria the indoor air temperature and a thermal comfort adaptive model. The research made use of the software VisualDOE 4.1 in two simulations runs of a base case modeled for two basic types of occupancies: living room and bedroom. In the first simulation run, sensitive analyses were made to identify the variables with the higher impact over the cases´ thermal performance. Besides that, the results also allowed the formulation of design recommendations to warm humid climates toward an improvement on the thermal performance of residential building in similar situations. The results of the second simulation run was used to identify the named Thermal Performance Spectrum (TPS) of both occupancies types, which reflect the variations on the thermal performance considering the local climate, building typology, chosen construction material and studied occupancies. This analysis generates an index named IDTR Thermal Performance Resultant Index, which was configured as a thermal performance rating system. It correlates the thermal performance with the number of hours that the indoor air temperature was on each of the six thermal comfort bands pre-defined that received weights to measure the discomfort intensity. The use of this rating system showed to be appropriated when used in one of the simulated cases, presenting advantages in relation to other evaluation methods and becoming a tool for the understanding of building thermal behavior

Por uma moradia termicamente confortável: proposta de habitação de interesse social com ênfase no conforto térmico

This research covers the topic of social housing and its relation to thermal comfort, so applied to an architectural and urban intervention in land situated in central urban area of Macaíba/RN, Brazil. Reflecting on the role of design and use of alternative building materials in the search for better performance is one of its main goals. The hypothesis is that by changing design parameters and choice of materials, it is possible to achieve better thermal performance results. Thus, we performed computer simulations of thermal performance and natural ventilation using computational fluid dynamics or CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). The presentation of the thermal simulation followed the methodology proposed in the dissertation Negreiros (2010), which aims to find the percentage of the amount of hours of comfort obtained throughout the year, while data analysis was made of natural ventilation from images generated by the images extracted from the CFD. From model building designed, was fitted an analytical framework that results in a comparison between three different proposals for dwellings housing model, which is evaluated the question of the thermal performance of buildings, and also deals with the spatial variables design, construction materials and costs. It is concluded that the final report confirmed the general hypotheses set at the start of the study, it was possible to quantify the results and identify the importance of design and construction materials are equivalent, and that, if combined, lead to gains in thermal performance potential.