University of the Cordilleras

College of Engineering & Architecture Architecture

Department
2ND Trimester AY 2021-2022
RESEARCH WORK

AR-TD 1 L&S: TROPICAL DESIGN

RSW FN 02
TITLE:
1. PASSIVE COOLING SYSTEMS

DATE SUBMITTED: MARCH, 29, 2022

REFERENCES:
https://www.atamate.com/atamate-blog/passive-cooling-for-low-energy-buildings
https://glassed.vitroglazings.com/topics/the-difference-between-r-value-and-u-
value#:~:text=While%20U%2Dvalue%20is%20used,mathematical%20reciprocals%20of%20e
ach%20other.

STUDENT: Marquez, Javen Lei M.

INSTRUCTOR: Ar. Victor Conrad Alinio

Passive Cooling Systems

Passive cooling methods keep the temperature inside a building

comfortable without using energy-hungry air-conditioning, fans or
heat pumps. Cooling is needed during the summer, when air
temperatures get uncomfortably high, but also at cooler times
because electronic devices and simple human metabolism can
make a building uncomfortably hot.

Passive cooling: how cool is comfortable?

The figure we need to talk about is 23.5°C (74°F). That's the

temperature that most of us call comfortable. If the room is colder
than that, we put on a jumper and turn off the heating. If the room
is warmer than that, we take the jumper off and open a window.

Admittedly, some individuals prefer it a degree or two warmer or

cooler than that, and we’d all like it a little cooler if we're doing
anything physical. It will surprise no one who has ever heard an
office argument about aircon to know that the average man tends
to prefer a slightly cooler 22°C (72°F) than the average woman who
prefers 25°C (77°F), but we all like the mercury to be in roughly the
same part of the thermometer and 23.5°C is a figure that we can all
live with.

As Britain is a drafty little cluster of islands in the North Atlantic, the

air temperature is well below the magic 23.5°C for most of the year
so we design our buildings to keep heat in. The building regulations
put a lot of emphasis on insulation, which keeps heating bills down
while minimising the amount of carbon being oxidised to keep us
comfortable. It makes sense for nine months of the year but for the
other three, that insulation will turn a warm winter home into a
summer oven unless there's some way of cooling the building.

If the buildings going up today are going to last as long as the

century-old buildings that many of us are still living in, they'll need to
accommodate the changing climate. While there are too many
variables for an accurate prediction of how much the world will
warm up overall, it's clear that we're going to see more extreme
events like the heatwave of 2018. Winters will get warmer by a few
degrees on average over the coming decades, but the mercury
will be bouncing around above and below the average as much
as it does today. There will still be enough cold snaps that we won’t
be scrimping on the insulation any time soon, so a low-energy
building will need passive cooling systems to stay comfortably cool
in summer.
Keeping cool the low-energy way
When we talk about cooling down buildings, we tend to think of air-
conditioning units, which we've discussed elsewhere. Aircon can
certainly cool us down, but it's so energy-hungry that the Carbon
Trust estimates that a typical office spends over 30% of its annual
electricity budget on aircon even though it's only switched on for
part of the year. If we start putting aircon in homes, a lot of people
are going to be crying over their electricity bills. Taking a wider view,
using so much electricity will mean burning more coal during
heatwaves caused by climate change, which is rather like opening
the fridge door to cool the room on a global scale.

Passive cooling uses the physics of heat energy itself to keep it

outside the building. Some techniques are based entirely on the
building design, while others need the people in the building to do
something or have it done for them by a control system. The passive
cooling techniques that will work for a given building will depend on
its size, orientation and intended use.

Those systems may be used alongside aircon, reducing the amount

of time that it needs to be switched on for, or they may replace
aircon altogether. In either case, many passive cooling methods
involve directing an air flow through the building which maintains
the air quality as well as keeping it cool so there is a substantial
overlap with ventilation.
Types of passive cooling:

Shading
The simplest way of stopping a building from getting too hot is to
prevent heat energy from getting inside in the first place. As heat
energy comes from the sun and Britain is in the northern
hemisphere, that means paying particular attention to any south-
facing windows.

Shading is far from a new idea. If you've ever visited the

Mediterranean European regions like Spain, Greece or the South of
France, you've probably noticed that architects have been
designing windows with external shutters for centuries.

In Britain, we tend to have curtains inside the windows which can

protect us from the glare of sunlight but don't do much to stop the
air from heating up. Once the heat energy gets past the window,
we're stuck with it until we can get it out.

biochemistry building 2A traditional solution for keeping sunlight

away from a building is to plant trees or shrubbery between a
window and where the sun will be when it's at its most fierce.
Deciduous species shed their leaves in the autumn, letting the
winter sunlight through when we need its help to heat the building,
but regrow their leaves in the summer to give you a natural shutter
when you need it.

Trees and shrubs are well and good for windows on the ground floor
that have a garden to the south, but we have to look for other
design solutions for anything else. Another trick we can borrow from
the Mediterranean architects of yesteryear is the brise-soleil: a
structure that shades a window from the high summer sun while
allowing the winter sun, which is lower in the sky, shine through a
window. The simplest brise-soleil is a shade jutting out over a
window, or a building design in which the glass windows are set
back from the edge of the building. More complex brise-soleils take
the form of a lattice outside the window, while some large buildings
go even further with a lattice of motorised louvres controlled to vary
the amount of sunlight hitting the building.

Another solution for a low-energy building is a motorised blind,

ideally between a double-glazed window on the outside and with
another pane on the inside. Such a system keeps the blind clean
and protected while allowing easier access for maintenance than if
it were between the double-glazed panes. The double glazing
provides insulation for the winter, while the blind provides shading in
the summer. The motor can be incorporated into a building control
system, so you don't even have to remember to lower it yourself.
Cross-ventilation
As soon as the temperature inside a building rises above the
temperature outside, it's worth opening windows on both sides of
the building to let a cool breeze push the hot air out. It's a rare day
in Britain where there's no breeze at all, but there are ways to get
the most out of that breeze.
The same trees and shrubbery that shade the house can help with
the cross ventilation if they're planted in the right places. Judicious
landscaping can funnel the prevailing summer wind in the direction
of the windows.

The choice of window type can also help. Casement windows,

which pivot outward from the frame, can redirect a breeze that's
blowing past the building to blow directly into the building, pushing
that hot air out all the quicker.

Types of window.A smart building control system can make the

most of cross-ventilation by combining temperature sensors with
motorised windows. It can open windows to cross-ventilate the
building as soon as it measures the internal temperature as both
uncomfortably warm and higher than the external temperature.
That means no more coming home from work to a house that feels
like a furnace because it's been accumulating heat energy all day.

Building controls are particularly useful for co-ordinating cross-

ventilation in multi-user buildings. The people living in a flat or
working in an office may only have access to the windows on one
side of a building, and they're not likely to rush back and forth to
co-ordinate cross-ventilation with whoever is on the other side. As
long as everyone has agreed on what temperature they prefer, the
building controls can do it for them.
Thermal mass and roof space

Shading can keep a building from heating up and cross-ventilation

can get rid of heat energy from inside the building, but neither of
them can lower the temperature inside the building to below the
external air temperature. During a heatwave, that external
temperature is likely to be above the magic 23.5°C for several
hours. It may not be possible to keep all that heat energy out of the
building but fabric with a high thermal mass can absorb it and keep
it out of the air we're living in.

The principle behind using the thermal mass of the building has
been understood since long before designers had the equations to
predict how it would work. That's why various forms of adobe, or
mudbrick, turn up in building design throughout the tropics. From
the mud mosques of Timbuktu to the thousand-year-old Pueblo
dwellings of the North American deserts, buildings exposed to the
blazing sun have been designed to absorb that heat into the walls
to keep the air temperature comfortable.

Modern designers use materials such as bricks and concrete, which

have a similarly high thermal mass and soak up the summer heat in
the same way as the buildings designed by those long-lost Pueblo
architects.
Designing a building with a space between the ceiling and the top
of the roof is another technique for keeping the heat energy
outside the living space. Because the summer sun is high in the sky,
much of its heat comes through the roof to heat the air at the
highest point in the building. Because warm air rises, that warm air
will stay up there. If the highest point in the building is an empty
space, or possibly a loft that's only used for storage, the hottest air
can be sequestered away from the people who will sweat in it.

When the night brings cooler air, the heat energy absorbed into the
building fabric is released into it. The internal temperature remains
pleasantly cool during the day because the heat energy is
absorbed by the fabric, but doesn't plummet with the external
temperature at night because some of that heat energy is released
inside the building.

Stack ventilation

We all learned in primary school that hot air rises, though our
teachers rarely mention how that informs building design. Whenever
the internal temperature is higher than the outside, the cooler air
coming into the building will settle lower down while the warmer air
floats on top of it. That's why stack ventilation is sometimes called
buoyancy-driven ventilation. As the warm air floats upward, it will
eventually find its way out of the roof so anything we can do to
smooth its path will help to cool the building. The main use of stack
ventilation is night flushing or night cooling, in which the heat
energy accumulated during the day is released into the cooler air
of the night. Night flushing is essential to making the most of a
building with a high thermal mass because the fabric needs to get
rid of the energy stored during the day. Releasing the heat energy
into the night frees up the capacity to absorb the heat that will
come down with the next day.
There are various ways in which modern building design can speed
the process. Opening windows on the ground floor can help by
letting the cool night air in and giving the warm air a shove in the
right direction. A central staircase can function as a chimney, giving
the warm air a clear route up and out.

Building controls can open those lower floor windows when the
outside air is cool enough to start the night flushing and close them
when the fabric has shed all its heat energy. That's necessary
because as long as the fabric is releasing heat energy, it's heating
the air inside the building in the same way as a radiator does. Once
all the heat energy has dissipated, the air temperature inside the
building will start dropping toward the temperature of the air
outside, which is likely to be colder than is comfortable. Having a
control system close the window as soon as the temperature starts
dropping can save waking up into a chilly bedroom.

The larger the building, the more heat energy it will accumulate.
That's partly because it has more fabric absorbing solar heat, but
also because it's likely to have more people in it doing the things
that people do to generate heat: cooking, running electronic
devices, storing food in freezers or simply metabolising. Fortunately,
the higher the building, the greater the potential for stack
ventilation. That central staircase can lead up to a vent in the
ceiling, which not only makes it easier for the hot air to escape but
can let any wind blowing across the top of it actually draw it out
because air pressure is lower in the open air than in the enclosed
vent; a phenomenon known as the Venturi effect.

Schematic of solar chimney.Some multi-story buildings take it further

with a solar chimney, which draws warm air from throughout the
building and sends it upward and out into the atmosphere.
Because the tower pushes the buoyant warm air into a narrower
space than a staircase, the Venturi effect of the wind blowing
across the top is enhanced so the warm air is funneled out at some
speed.

It's been suggested that the

heat energy whistling out of the
chimney could be used to drive
a turbine and power some of
those screens and freezers that
heated it in the first place.
Unfortunately, the technology
to do that is some way from
being mature but a couple of
years ago, a group of
researchers from the USA,
Singapore and Dubai came
together to show how it might
be done Their ideas for a city
powered by the heat it
generates remains a vision of
the future - for now.
One of the most important glass performance measures is U-value—
also known as U-factor—which measures the insulating
characteristics of the glass, or how much heat flow or heat loss
occurs through the glass due to the difference between indoor and
outdoor temperatures.
U-values can tell you how well an insulated glass unit (IGU) will hold
in heated or cooled air. The lower the number, the better the
insulating performance. U-values generally range from 0.1 (very little
heat loss) to 1.0 (high heat loss). The U-value of a window is
measured by the number of BTUs that will pass through each square
foot of area per degree of temperature difference from one side of
the window to the other.

So, what is the difference between U-value and R-value? And how
are they used differently?

While U-value is used to measure the performance assemblies such

as IGUs, R-value is used to measure the performance of most other
parts of the building envelope, such as walls, floors and roofs.

There is a relationship between U-value and R-value—they are

mathematical reciprocals of each other. Thus, while lower U-values
indicate better insulating performance, higher R-values indicate
better thermal resistance.

To calculate R-value, divide 1 by the U-value figure. For example, a

U-value of 0.10 equals an R-value of 10 (1 divided by 0.10). To
calculate U-value, divide 1 by the R-value—a 3.45 R-value equals a
U-value of 0.29.
Variations and Strategies for Improving U-Value
Summer daytime U-value and winter nighttime U-value are two
common derivatives of U-value.

U-value (also known as U-factor) is a measure of heat transfer (heat

gain or loss through glass), while R-value is a measure of heat
resistance. U-value is not a material rating; it is a calculation of the
conduction properties of various materials used in the construction
of windows, doors and skylights.

Summer daytime U-value measures environmental conditions of a

hot outside temperature and direct sunlight. A lower summer
daytime U-value means the glass is better at blocking re-radiated
heat, which increases the efficiency of air conditioning systems.

Winter nighttime U-value measures the environmental conditions of

a cold outside temperature and no sunlight. A lower winter
nighttime U-value means the glass is better at keeping heat inside,
increasing the efficiency of heating systems.

Some of the ways U-values can be improved are:

Use double- or triple-glazed IGUs

Use a noble gas, such as argon, in the cavity between lites of glass
Optimize the cavity size between lites of glass—a ½ " space
between lites is the most widely used for both air and argon
Specify warm-edge spacers that create an effective thermal
barrier, and
Use low-e coatings (coatings can be used on more than one
surface)