Assessing and mitigating overheating risk in existing Canadian school buildings under extreme current and future climates
Date
2022
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Elsevier
Abstract
Canadian buildings have been primarily designed to withstand cold and long winters, not hot summers.
With climate change and the increase in the intensity and severity of heatwaves, it has become important
to investigate overheating in buildings. However, there are limited studies on assessing and mitigating
the overheating risk in existing buildings that house vulnerable populations in cold climates, especially
in Canada. This paper provides a framework for the systematic assessment of overheating risks and
the development of passive mitigation strategies to reduce the overheating risks without increasing cool ing energy consumption under current and future climates with simulation models that are calibrated
based on measured indoor air temperatures and outdoor weather conditions. The framework is applied
to a school building built in 1958. The calibrated building model achieved an RMSE of less than 0.6 C
compared with measurements, a Maximum-Absolute-Difference of less than 1.9 C, and a 1 C
Percentage-Error of less than 10 %. The simulation results from the calibrated model predicted 110 over heating hours during the year 2020. The use of exterior blind roll or a combination of night cooling and
other mitigation measures that reduce solar heat gain can achieve acceptable thermal conditions. In 2044
(the future extreme midterm year), night cooling with the exterior blind roll shading would be required
during extreme heat events. Whereas during 2090 (the future long-term extreme year), additional mit igation measures such as a cool roof may be required to achieve an acceptable level of thermal conditions
in the school.
Description
Keywords
Overheating assessment
Existing Canadian school
Field measurements
Future climates
Passive mitigation measures
Citation
Baba, F.M. et al. (2023) “Assessing and mitigating overheating risk in existing Canadian school buildings under extreme current and future climates,” Energy & Buildings, 279.