The Impacts of Orientation and Building form on Internal Temperature of Visitor Center Building for Moderate and Hot Climate

Abstract

Passive building strategies such as building form, orientation and window ratio can have an essential impact on the indoor temperature. Building form and ordination can obtain heat gains. The designer usually designs buildings with little consideration of heat gains. This study pointed to the influence of building form and orientation in internal temperature in moderate and hot climates. In the present paper, the impact of building orientation on the indoor thermal comfort conditions expressed in terms of internal temperature is numerically investigated. This is motivated by required achievement of the thermal comfort conditions in such buildings located on hot climate regions. Moreover, the moderate climate regions are also incorporated in the present study. The numerical simulation is carried out using the TAS EDSL software to assess the optimum form model for a prefab visitor center. The result, in a moderate climate, showed that the ideal direction was obtained when the visitor center faces the south direction. Different models for building orientations have been studied and the results are presented. The results should that the internal temperature was 37.85oC for the currently model orientation and 37.71oC for the other model (known as model D), where the external temperature was 37.9oC. The worst orientations were the west direction for the case study and the east for the D model. In terms of hot climate, the internal temperature decreased by 1.0oC when west-facing. However, models with openings decreased 0.5oC. There are other passive design strategies that can be installed to models which can lead to improving the thermal comfort. The strategies can be considered for further future research.