Journal
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
Volume 154, Issue -, Pages 499-512Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA
DOI: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2017.07.080
Keywords
Sustainable building solutions; Natural ventilation; Thermal chimney; Night air purge; Thermal comfort; Tropical climate
Funding
- CGH-SUTD HealthTech Innovation Fund [CGH-SUTD-HTIF-2013-008]
- National Research Foundation (NRF) via Green Buildings Innovation Cluster (GBIC) [NRF2015ENC-GBICRD001-028]
- SUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC)
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Located near the equator, Singapore has a tropical rainforest climate with high temperature and high humidity. In hospitals of Singapore, the subsidized patient wards are designed to be naturally ventilated, considering the affordability for patients. However, due to the high occupant density of the patient wards and the hot humid climate, occupants may feel discomfort, especially in the older hospital wards which were not well designed for natural ventilation. In this paper, the thermal comfort level of occupants at Singapore's Changi General Hospital (CGH) is evaluated based on both in-situ measurements and modeling analysis. Against this backdrop, several low energy solution concepts that potentially improve the thermal comfort level of occupants in patient wards are analyzed and simulated using detailed building thermodynamic and airflow simulation. We found that this approach of combining thermodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, and thermal comfort level models was effective for analyzing and comparing the thermal comfort impact of alternative, low-energy building retrofit concepts. We also found that passive solutions to ventilation could be used effectively for a patient hospital ward, even in the tropical warm climate of Singapore. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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