Enhancing Thermal Comfort and Climate Resilience of Buildings during Extreme Events

Dear Colleagues,

Climate changes, heat waves, forest fires, cold spells, air pollution, and power outages are threatening today's cities and posing crucial challenges for buildings' comfort. Together with providing resilient cooling solutions that increase the penetration and share of central and personalized cooling and heating systems to decarbonize the energy supply, it is also essential to make buildings resilient against climate variations and extremes.

This becomes challenging during extreme climatic events such as fire breakouts, heat domes, earthquakes, cyclones, and power outages. The risks and consequences of long-term and short extreme climate events are amplified in buildings that require strict thermal comfort conditions with vulnerable user profiles, such as hospitals, nursing homes, blood banks etc. A failure in assuring minimum thermal comfort or indoor air quality levels can propagate towards occupants' evacuations, stroke risk, or increased mortality rates inducing cascading failures. The shortage of evacuation centers in most cities and the risk of spreading infectious diseases are major problems in evacuation centers.

Therefore, evaluating buildings' resilience against short and long-term climate change-related disruptions is vital to decrease such risks and safely prepare the newly built and existing climate-proof. This special issue aims to provide a long-lasting contribution to the occupant health and comfort in buildings to strengthen interdisciplinary research and share the dynamics and cutting-edge views in the related fields mentioned above. Three main aspects of a building’s reaction to shocks are identified:

• How long can a building withstand severe consequences of shocks? (resistivity)
• How quickly can a building get back to acceptable indoor conditions? (recovery)
• How severe is the impact of the shock on comfort? (severity)

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Definitions of heat waves and development of future weather files and weather data for short-term and long-term climate change scenarios for building performance simulations, including the urban heat island effect, air pollution events, forest fires or heat waves.
• Evaluation methods and solutions to prepare buildings with resilient cooling and heating technologies and installing storage batteries for summer and winter disruptions.
• Develop definitions and long-term and short-term indicators that embrace the concept of resilience involving the preparedness and recovery of building against extreme events. The indicates should be able to quantify the thermal safety and thermal autonomy and thermal resistivity of buildings, and the levels of discomfort or overheating based on international standards, adapted comfort models and temperature setpoint relaxation.
• Modeling of both active and passive cooling technologies of the following four groups to reduce externally induced heat gains to indoor environments; to enhance personal comfort apart from cooling whole spaces; to remove sensible heat from indoor environments, and to control latent heat (humidity) of indoor environments.
• Technological solutions include Personalized Environmental Control Systems (PECS) and radiant systems adapted to an emergency situations and power outages such as ventilative cooling and solar shading, including storage, for example, cogeneration, solid oxide fuel cells, and hydrogen fuel cells.
• When planning for resilience, there are theoretical and practical approaches to deal with adaptive thermal comfort, building dynamics, occupant behavioral modeling, and mixed mode or hybrid operation.
• Spatial and behavioral thermal adaptation measures and scenarios of occupants and behavioral modeling. The case studies or measures can include integrating thermal spatial adaptation design strategies, such as thermal zoning and compartmentation, stratification, etc.,
• Demand response and user comfort in highly sensitive/vulnerable buildings (Comfort Category I), including the evaluation of recovery time.
• Transferring peak loads to off-shock hours and peak load reductions (peak shaving and peak shifting)
• Climate change resilience scenarios and case studies with renewable energy generation, including PV power generation capacity and electric load profiling during AC shutdown, heating systems shutdown, and power outage.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Buildings.

Prof. Dr. Shady Attia
Guest Editor

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