iPHA Webinar June 2021|Speakers: Soraya López García and Jessica Grove-Smith, Passive House Institute
Thermal comfort throughout the year – winter and summer – lies at the very heart of the Passive House concept. In the light of warming climate conditions and urban densification, effective design strategies to prevent overheating in buildings are becoming increasingly important and are all-to-often overlooked or neglected. This webinar presents and discusses various strategies for designing robust buildings with regard to summer comfort in climatic regions where there is traditionally no need for active cooling. The speakers will present passive cooling concepts and solutions, as well as introduce summer stress test calculations in order to account for the impact of occupant interaction with the building.
The summer temperature inside a building is majorly influenced by solar loads, internal heat loads and the ventilation strategy, depending on the climatic region. Passive cooling techniques play a key role for preventing internal temperatures from exceeding uncomfortable and unhealthy conditions. The first part of the presentation will provide a summary of the most effective passive cooling strategies and design parameters in energy efficient buildings to reduce the frequency of overheating.
Design optimisation and prioritisation considerably contribute to reducing the risk of overheating under warming climate conditions and with uncertain user interaction with the building in use. Stress testing the design can help to better understand the different influencing factors and thus provide guidance on more robust and resilient design choices. The second focus of the webinar is on how to set up such stress test calculation with the PHPP for more robust building design.