Bioclimatic Design Guidelines for Design Decision Support to Enhance Residential Building Thermal Performance in Tropical Regions

With the rise of building thermal comfort issues, the Bioclimatic Design Guideline for Cambodia (BDGC) has been developed to help architects make informed decisions during their design process to achieve maximum thermal comfort with minimum energy consumption. This paper aims to investigate the reliability of this guideline as decision support to enhance residential building thermal performance by using two research approaches: usability tests and calibrated thermal performance simulations based on real buildings monitoring and simulations using DesignBuilder. Five groups of architects and students in architectural engineering participated in the usability test to redesign two common typologies of single-family homes with weak thermal performance by using bioclimatic design guidelines, such as orientation, improved ventilation, shading, and green rood, to enhance their comfort level. The simulation shows that, by applying bioclimatic design strategies, the indoor temperature in the base case house can be lower from 2 to 4 °C. Various benefits are identified from the integration of the BDGC during the design process for improving residential building design. Moreover, the proposed methodology can be applied to develop and validate bioclimatic guidelines in other regions and various countries worldwide.