Impact of Climate Change on High-Performance Belgian Houses: Thermal Comfort, HVAC Energy Performance, and HVAC GHG Emissions

Climate change arising from natural and anthropogenic sources affects the built environment in several ways. One of the major impacts of climate change is the increase in average air temperatures that can lead to more intense, severe, and prolonged heatwaves. This study is developed to project the effect of such warming weather conditions on Belgian high-performance houses and provide an idea of mitigation strategies. The study consists of three main parts (Part I, Part II, and Part III). In Part I, the study investigates a large number of thermal comfort/overheating evaluation methods to find... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Rahif, Ramin
Dokumenttyp: doctoral thesis
Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
Verlag/Hrsg.: ULiège - University of Liège
Schlagwörter: Climate Change / Global Warming / Thermal Comfort / Overheating / HVAC / Energy Performance / Decarbonization / Building Simulation / Future Weather Data / Uncertainty Analysis / Sensitivity Analysis / Optimization / Passive Design / Engineering / computing & technology / Energy / Ingénierie / informatique & technologie / Energie
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27314246
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/303336

Climate change arising from natural and anthropogenic sources affects the built environment in several ways. One of the major impacts of climate change is the increase in average air temperatures that can lead to more intense, severe, and prolonged heatwaves. This study is developed to project the effect of such warming weather conditions on Belgian high-performance houses and provide an idea of mitigation strategies. The study consists of three main parts (Part I, Part II, and Part III). In Part I, the study investigates a large number of thermal comfort/overheating evaluation methods to find a fit-to-purpose and appropriate method. It then provides a critical and qualitative review of resilient cooling strategies that can be applied as mitigation strategies. In Part II, a comprehensive simulation-based methodological framework is introduced to assess and compare the resistivity of buildings and their cooling strategies to the overheating impact of climate change. This part also provides an extensive weather dataset to estimate the changes in weather conditions and heatwaves in Belgium by the end of the century under different emission scenarios. In Part III, numerical studies are performed to predict the changes in thermal comfort conditions, HVAC energy performance, and HVAC Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in Belgian high-performance houses due to climate change. This part includes the evaluation of a set of active and passive cooling strategies based on uncertainty analysis, sensitivity analysis, and optimization techniques. Some of the key findings of this study are (i) current building policies and regulations in the region fail to quantify overheating in the context of climate change accurately, (ii) a heating-dominated region like Belgium is expected to become a cooling-dominated one by the end of the century, (iii) replacement of traditional HVAC systems with more efficient ones (e.g., reversible air-to-water heat pump) has a potential of reducing HVAC primary energy use and HVAC GHG emissions up to 13% ...