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Design of high performance buildings : Vulnerability of buildings to climate change from an energy perspective

The challenge of climate change is twofold: to mitigate (prevent) the causes of climate change and to prepare (adapt) to the inevitable effects and consequences. Building and construction are key sectors for decarbonisation (mitigation). The increase in intensity, frequency and duration of heat waves threatens indoor comfort and constitutes a health and comfort risk (adaptation).Therefore, regulations are being changed to take into account related emissions and extreme episodes through new indicators. However, up to now, past climate observations are still used in the calculation of these indicators. This raises the question of how to integrate future climate predictions into regulations. This work aims at characterising the vulnerability of buildings to climate change and aimsat taking into account future climate predictions in building design. It establishes a method for constructing standard weather data based on climate projections and for identifying vulnerable building typologies that are at risk. This project stands out for the use of a large number of building and meteorological data. 77 residential buildings from the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB) database and 78 years (1981-2058) of weather data for 9 climate models (RCP8.5 scenario) are crossed for Dynamic Thermal Simulations (DTS) on COMETh. The study first highlights the relevance of using reference and extreme years, representative of the climate data, to reduce the number of simulations. The reference year makes it possible to observe the average needs over a period. The extreme year estimates the range of values around this mean.The report then raises the issue of cooling systems as one of the major challenges for energy needs. Under the effect of climate change, heating requirements are decreasing and largely compensate the increase of cooling needs. But few buildings in France are already equipped with cooling systems and the creation of a need exceeding a threshold leads to the purchase of new units. This raises a problem of social equity in access to thermal comfort. Moreover, the environmentalimpact of these systems is more related to refrigerants necessary for the manufacturethan to energy consumption.The research finally proposes a method to classify passive or active buildings (in the sense of cooling needs), that are adapted or not adapted to future extreme weather conditions. This involves applying a clustering algorithm (k-means) to group similar buildings together in terms of energy requirements for different climate models. This method already makes it possible to identify the buildings at risk and to prioritise the measures to be taken (energy renovation). This classification also opens up the possibility of extending this work to newer, larger and more diversified samples. Similar encouraging results were obtained from 2470 offices. They could helpidentify technical and architectural characteristics and assist in the design of efficient passive buildings.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-309915
Date January 2022
CreatorsGobert, Robin
PublisherKTH, Hållbara byggnader
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
RelationTRITA-ABE-MBT ; 2222

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