Resilient passive cooling strategies during heat waves: A quantitative assessment in different climates

[en] The global impacts of climate change are expected to raise the frequency and severity of extreme events like heat waves, posing significant challenges for buildings and their cooling systems. To safeguard occupants from potentially hazardous indoor temperatures, buildings and their cooling systems must be designed and managed to withstand these conditions and thus be resilient. This study assessed via building simulations the resilience performance of selected individual passive cooling strategies for five different climates (ASHRAE climate zones 2A, 3A, 3B, 4A, and 6A) and three heatwave periods (historical, future mid-term and future long-term). Resilience performance was assessed with three criteria: heatwave impact (°C·h above a reference standard effective temperature), absorptivity rate (°C/h), and recovery rate (°C/h). Strategies such as solar shading, cool envelope materials, advanced glazing, and ventilative cooling could each reduce the heat wave impact and the absorptivity rates in all studied climates at different levels of efficiency. As the heat waves became more extreme, the performance declined at different rates depending on the climate. Some strategies were more suited to specific climates such as cool envelope materials in climate 2A. Most strategies could not speed up the recovery rates from the heat waves except for ventilative cooling in climate 3B. With careful design to maximize the benefits of favorable wind conditions, every climate could benefit from ventilative cooling strategies to speed up recovery from heat waves.

Disciplines :

Architecture

Author, co-author :

Al-Assaad, Douaa

Sengupta, Abantika

An, Peihang

Breesch, Hilde

Afshari, Afshin

Amaripadath, Deepak ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Urban and Environmental Engineering

Attia, Shady ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département ArGEnCo > Techniques de construction des bâtiments

Baba, Fuad

Corrado, Vincenzo

Eli, Letícia

More authors (8 more)

Language :

English

Title :

Resilient passive cooling strategies during heat waves: A quantitative assessment in different climates

Publication date :

15 April 2025

Journal title :

Building and Environment

ISSN :

0360-1323

eISSN :

1873-684X

Publisher :

Elsevier BV

Volume :

274

Pages :

112698

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Development Goals :

11. Sustainable cities and communities
13. Climate action

Additional URL :

https://api.elsevier.com/content/article/PII:S0360132325001805?httpAccept=text/xml

Funders :

IWT - Agentschap Innoveren en Ondernemen

Available on ORBi :

since 12 February 2025

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