Assessing overheating risk and thermal comfort in state-of-the-art prototype houses that combat exacerbated climate change in UK.

Highlights • The aim of this research is to investigate the thermal performance of the prototype building to assess overheating in the summer, particularly the long-term heatwave period in the UK. • To understand the impact of energy efficient technologies on occupants' wellbeing and health in order to identify occupants' thermal comfort level in these types of dwellings. • The study adopts a quantitative research design based on indoor monitoring, in-situ measurements and dynamic simulation modelling. • This clearly indicates that due to this prototype house's structural construction material behaviour in a heatwave and its location (southwest facing orientation), it is susceptible to very high overheating risk. • The results found from the monitoring during a long-term heatwave in the summer of 2018 provided strong evidence for overheating and thereby thermal discomfort in many occupied spaces, particularly on the first floor followed by several spaces on the ground floor. Meanwhile, all the occupied spaces appeared to be well above the acceptable thermal comfort benchmark throughout the data collection period. • To calibrate the building performance, as well as the building materials and components adopted in the model, the measured indoor environment data were scrutinised in conjunction with the IES simulation results. Abstract There is growing evidence that terraced houses—thermally lightweight, well insulated, naturally ventilated with three exposed wall surfaces—are at risk of overheating, especially in south-eastern England. The aim of this study is to evaluate the building performance and develop a reliable building simulation, which will be employed in the second phase of the study: developing affordable and feasible passive design strategies to support the energy-efficient building systems of the construction industry. This paper reports on the results from the first phase of the study where a quantitative methodology, including indoor and outdoor environmental monitoring, in-situ measurements and building simulation modelling, was adopted. The performance of a case study was modelled and simulated via employing Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) software suite. The results from the base-case were analysed according to the adaptive thermal comfort of Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) Technical Memorandum 52 guidelines: The Limits of Thermal Comfort—Avoiding Overheating in European Buildings. The spaces studied within the case study house were observed to exceed the acceptable limits of thermal comfort; particularly, the large bedroom within this zone exceeded the upper limit for overheating up to 11 h daily. Furthermore, the results from the monitoring study indicate a high risk of summertime overheating across all the case study settings, especially during short-term peaks in outdoor temperatures. The main reasons for the problematic thermal performance were identified as well-insulated and fully air-tight building fabric, the lack of sufficient ventilation through the living spaces and excessive heat gains through the composite cladding material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]