Evaluation of the thermal performance of low-cost houses under tropical climatic conditions.

The construction of dwellings for people with low incomes in developing countries encompasses a broad range of issues starting from the choice of the building site, to the construction phase and finally to the evaluation of the building itself. For tropical climates, the thermal evaluation of low-cost dwellings should be primarily related to the optimization of internal comfort conditions. Nevertheless, from the financial point of view, the improvement of thermal comfort conditions in low-cost housing should not result in a substantial increase in the final building costs. In the present research, the impact of low-cost strategies for the achievement of better thermal comfort conditions, such as improved ventilation techniques and appropriate building design was analysed for a typical project of a low-cost dwelling in Brazil. In this paper the methodology developed and the simulation results for summer climatic conditions of the city Florian6polis (27.5°S) are presented. It was possible to evaluate in a detailed manner the impact of several natural ventilation strategies for a single-storey building with the AIOLOS software. Using the outputs in the form of airflow data as inputs for the TRNSYS simulation environment, the potential of design strategies was then observed, and several design improvements were proposed.