Sustainability through Optimal Design of Buildings for Natural Ventilation using Updated Comfort and Occupancy Models

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel workflow integrating natural ventilation simulation with generative design to optimize residential building layouts for energy efficiency and comfort, using adaptive models and occupant behavior data.

Contribution

It introduces a new generative design process that incorporates updated comfort and occupancy models to enhance natural ventilation and energy savings in residential buildings.

Findings

Multi-mode cooling strategies reduce energy use significantly.

Natural ventilation can be effectively integrated without major comfort loss.

The workflow generates diverse, plausible floor plans for optimized design.

Abstract

This paper explores the benefits of incorporating natural ventilation (NV) simulation into a generative process of designing residential buildings to improve energy efficiency and indoor thermal comfort. Our proposed workflow uses the Wave Function Collapse algorithm to generate a diverse set of plausible floor plans. It also includes post-COVID occupant presence models while incorporating adaptive comfort models. We conduct four sets of experiments using the workflow, and the simulated results suggest that multi-mode cooling strategies combining conventional air conditioning with NV can often significantly reduce energy use while introducing only slight reductions in thermal comfort.