A tale of four cities: the potential for achieving thermal comfort using natural ventilation in high rise buildings in four Asian cities.

This paper briefly outlines the development of a design tool for ascertaining thermal comfort in high rise buildings in the tropics. The design tool, based on wind tunnel studies and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations, was then applied to four cities in the tropics: Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jakarta and Hong Kong. Can thermal comfort be achieved using solely natural ventilation? The overall conclusion was that natural ventilation alone cannot generally provide thermal comfort in high rise buildings in the tropics. Consequently, future research and design should favour a multi modal passive approach (the so called "hybrid" building) if the goal of better sustainability in high rise buildings is to be achieved in the  tropics.