Performance-based co-design of natural ventilation systems to reduce cooling demand and improve thermal comfort in South East Asia

Team: Catherine Gorle, Sarah Billington, Rishee Jain, Gabrielle Wong-Parodi
Planning (Scoping)

With the increased frequency of extreme heat due to climate change, the energy required to cool buildings is rising unsustainably. This project proposes smarter cooling systems that leverage natural resources and adapt more successfully to climate conditions. The research explored three aspects of natural cooling (NC): modeling tools for performance-based NC design, human-centric control interfaces that optimize operational control, and policies and standards to accelerate NC uptake. In interviews, staff at the California Energy Commission (CEC) and architects, designers, and engineers weighed in on their approaches to designing buildings with natural cooling and the likelihood that they might apply new modeling and computational tools for design. The CEC staff indicated significant interest in promoting NC solutions, but the interviews with designers revealed a lack of readiness to adopt these advanced modeling tools due to insufficient knowledge and resources. This preliminary work helped the team in two ways. First, the team secured $1M in follow-on funding to continue its work on promoting NC solutions at a larger scale. Second, it discovered a widespread need for educational efforts and democratized high-performance computing to enable the design of resilient, sustainable buildings, considering not only the design of smarter cooling systems but more broadly the design of communities that are resilient to extreme wind events, urban heat island effects, and wind-driven fire in the wildland urban interface. Plans call for the creation of an open computing platform with trained personnel to support widespread adoption of these modeling approaches to address these design challenges. This approach will help us co-create new adjacent solutions and will also enhance the adaptation capacity of cities and communities.